Nature Communications (May 2016)

Mechanical slowing-down of cytoplasmic diffusion allows in vivo counting of proteins in individual cells

  • Burak Okumus,
  • Dirk Landgraf,
  • Ghee Chuan Lai,
  • Somenath Bakshi,
  • Juan Carlos Arias-Castro,
  • Sadik Yildiz,
  • Dann Huh,
  • Raul Fernandez-Lopez,
  • Celeste N. Peterson,
  • Erdal Toprak,
  • Meriem El Karoui,
  • Johan Paulsson

DOI
https://doi.org/10.1038/ncomms11641
Journal volume & issue
Vol. 7, no. 1
pp. 1 – 11

Abstract

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Several proteins are expressed at too low abundance in the Escherichia coli (E. coli) proteome to be detected by standard methods. Here, the authors create a microfluidics-based platform enabling single-molecule counting of low-abundance proteins by mechanically slowing-down their diffusion in live E. coli.