Imaging living obligate anaerobic bacteria with bilin-binding fluorescent proteins.

Fluorescent tools such as green fluorescent protein (GFP) have been used extensively as reporters in biochemistry and microbiology, but GFP and other conventional fluorescent proteins are restricted to aerobic environments. This limitation precludes fluorescence studies of anaerobic ecologies including polymicrobial communities in the human gut microbiome and in soil microbiomes, which profoundly affect health, disease, and the environment. To address this limitation, we describe the first implementation of two bilin-binding fluorescent proteins (BBFPs), UnaG and IFP2.

BR-Bodies Provide Selectively Permeable Condensates that Stimulate mRNA Decay and Prevent Release of Decay Intermediates.

Biomolecular condensates play a key role in organizing RNAs and proteins into membraneless organelles. Bacterial RNP-bodies (BR-bodies) are a biomolecular condensate containing the RNA degradosome mRNA decay machinery, but the biochemical function of such organization remains poorly defined. Here, we define the RNA substrates of BR-bodies through enrichment of the bodies followed by RNA sequencing (RNA-seq).

Rotation of Single-Molecule Emission Polarization by Plasmonic Nanorods.

The strong light-matter interactions between dyes and plasmonic nanoantennas enable the study of fundamental molecular-optical processes. Here, we overcome conventional limitations with high-throughput single-molecule polarization-resolved microscopy to measure dye emission polarization modifications upon near-field coupling to a gold nanorod. We determine that the emission polarization distribution is not only rotated toward the nanorod's dominant localized surface plasmon mode as expected, but it is also unintuitively broadened.