Inaugural Lectures by Fellows/Associates

Imaging Life with Dynamic Molecular Interactions

In this talk, the speaker will describe the group’s recent success of programming molecular assemblies in the living system based on a synthetic host-guest system featuring Cucurbit[7]uril (CB[7]). They demonstrated that highly selective and ultrastable hostguest interaction in CB[7] provides a non-covalent mechanism for assembling imaging agentsin cells and tissues. They have shown that CB[7]−ADA interaction fulfills the demands of specificity and stability that is required for bioorthogonal assembly in the living cell. They demonstrated this by labeling and imaging the distribution and dynamics of microtubule in HeLa cells. They used the dynamic nature of the supramolecular interaction to develop a new technique for super-resolution imaging with ~20 nm resolution. This technique, which they call SPIN (Supramolecular Probe-based Interaction mediated Nanoscopy), exploits repetitive and transient binding of the fluorescently labeled guest to complementary CB[7] host to obtain stochastic switching between fluorescence ON- and OFF-states. By connecting CB[7] guest to targeting ligands, they have demonstrated that this autonomous blinking enables two-dimensional (2D) and 3D superresolution imaging of biomolecules in cells.