Cancer Biology Program, Stanford University, Stanford, United States; Department of Genetics, Stanford University, Stanford, United States
Shawn M Gillespie
Cancer Biology Program, Stanford University, Stanford, United States; Department of Neurology and Neurological Sciences, Stanford University, Stanford, United States
Nicholas A Kalogriopoulos
Department of Genetics, Stanford University, Stanford, United States
Michael A Quezada
Department of Neurology and Neurological Sciences, Stanford University, Stanford, United States
Department of Neurology and Neurological Sciences, Stanford University, Stanford, United States; Department of Pathology, Stanford University, Stanford, United States; Department of Pediatrics, Stanford University, Stanford, United States; Department of Neurosurgery, Stanford University, Stanford, United States; Howard Hughes Medical Institute, Stanford University, Stanford, United States
Department of Genetics, Stanford University, Stanford, United States; Department of Biology, Stanford University, Stanford, United States; Department of Chemistry, Stanford University, Stanford, United States; Chan Zuckerberg Biohub, San Francisco, United States
Technologies for detecting cell-cell contacts are powerful tools for studying a wide range of biological processes, from neuronal signaling to cancer-immune interactions within the tumor microenvironment. Here, we report TRACC (Transcriptional Readout Activated by Cell-cell Contacts), a GPCR-based transcriptional recorder of cellular contacts, which converts contact events into stable transgene expression. TRACC is derived from our previous protein-protein interaction recorders, SPARK (Kim et al., 2017) and SPARK2 (Kim et al., 2019), reported in this journal. TRACC incorporates light gating via the light-oxygen-voltage-sensing (LOV) domain, which provides user-defined temporal control of tool activation and reduces background. We show that TRACC detects cell-cell contacts with high specificity and sensitivity in mammalian cell culture and that it can be used to interrogate interactions between neurons and glioma, a form of brain cancer.
