Design Strategies of Fluorescent Biosensors Based on Biological Macromolecular Receptors

Abstract

Fluorescent biosensors to detect the bona fide events of biologically important molecules in living cells are increasingly demanded in the field of molecular cell biology. Recent advances in the development of fluorescent biosensors have made an outstanding contribution to elucidating not only the roles of individual biomolecules, but also the dynamic intracellular relationships between these molecules. However, rational design strategies of fluorescent biosensors are not as mature as they look. An insatiable request for the establishment of a more universal and versatile strategy continues to provide an attractive alternative, so-called modular strategy, which permits facile preparation of biosensors with tailored characteristics by a simple combination of a receptor and a signal transducer. This review describes an overview of the progress in design strategies of fluorescent biosensors, such as auto-fluorescent protein-based biosensors, protein-based biosensors covalently modified with synthetic fluorophores, and signaling aptamers, and highlights the insight into how a given receptor is converted to a fluorescent biosensor. Furthermore, we will demonstrate a significance of the modular strategy for the sensor design.

Equilibrium and dynamic design principles for binding molecules engineered for reagentless biosensors

“…Based on the analysis of these criteria, we have presented here the limitations and trade-offs in the design of biosensors. While several reviews have been published for the design principles of reagentless sensors[1,38], they fail to acknowledge the importance of sensor-ligand kinetic binding parameters optimization for their particular application. Only through a dynamic analysis, as presented here, can the importance of the kinetic constants be highlighted.…”

Reagentless fluorescent biosensors based on proteins for continuous monitoring systems

“…However, despite the good prospects and apparent success, the predicted conformational changes after binding do not fully fit with the conformational changes shown by the crystal structure [81], so this methodology is the subject of controversy [82]. Alternatively, synthetic peptides are opening up a new route for obtaining bCR for OCMS [51,83].…”

Recent advances in biosensory and medicinal therapeutic applications of zinc(II) and copper(II) coordination complexes

“…Incorporating both organic and inorganic fluorophores into molecular recognition scaffolds has become a standard design feature of biosensory detection systems [41][42][43][44][45][46]. In the last decade, a plethora of fluorescently labelled Zn(II)coordination complexes have been synthesized and used for selective peptide and protein biosensing.…”