Strategies to promote permeation and vectorization, and reduce cytotoxicity of metal complex luminophores for bioimaging and intracellular sensing.

Transition metal luminophores are emerging as important tools for intracellular imaging and sensing. Their putative suitability for such applications has long been recognised but poor membrane permeability and cytotoxicity were significant barriers that impeded early progress. In recent years, numerous effective routes to overcoming these issues have been reported, inspired in part, by advances and insights from the pharmaceutical and drug delivery domains.

Nano-substructured plasmonic pore arrays: a robust, low cost route to reproducible hierarchical structures extended across macroscopic dimensions.

Plasmonic nanostructures are important across diverse applications from sensing to renewable energy. Periodic porous array structures are particularly attractive because such topography offers a means to encapsulate or capture solution phase species and combines both propagating and localised plasmonic modes offering versatile addressability. However, in analytical spectroscopic applications, periodic pore arrays have typically reported weaker plasmonic signal enhancement compared to particulate structures.

Optimizing fluorescent protein expression for quantitative fluorescence microscopy and spectroscopy using herpes simplex thymidine kinase promoter sequences.

The modulation of expression levels of fluorescent fusion proteins (FFPs) is central for recombinant DNA technologies in modern biology as overexpression of proteins contributes to artifacts in biological experiments. In addition, some microscopy techniques such as fluorescence correlation spectroscopy (FCS) and single-molecule-based techniques are very sensitive to high expression levels of FFPs. To reduce the levels of recombinant protein expression in comparison with the commonly used, very strong CMV promoter, the herpes simplex virus thymidine kinase (TK) gene promoter, and mutants thereof were analyzed.

Investigation of the molecular response to folate metabolism inhibition.

We investigated the molecular response to folate metabolism inhibition by exposing human lymphoblast cell lines to the methionine adenosyltransferase inhibitor cycloleucine. We carried out microarray analysis on replicate control and exposed cells by examining 47,000 transcripts on the Affymetrix HG U133 plus 2.0 arrays.