Light Control of Cellular Processes by Using Photocaged Abscisic Acid

Abstract

Abscisic acid (ABA) was chemically modified with a photocaging group to promote photo-induced protein dimerization. This photo-controlled chemically induced dimerization (CID) method based on caged ABA enables dose-dependent light regulation of cellular processes, including transcription, protein translocation, signal transduction and cytoskeletal remodeling, without the need to perform extensive protein engineering. Caged-ABA can be easily modified to respond to different wavelengths of light. Consequently, this strategy should be applicable to the design of light-regulated protein dimerization systems and potentially be used orthogonally with other light-controlled CID systems.

Plant Chemical Genetics: From Phenotype-Based Screens to Synthetic Biology

“…When fused to different proteins of interest, the rapamycin-induced dimerization of FKBP and FRB can be used to relocate proteins or reconstitute signaling cascades in a spatiotemporally controlled manner. As rapamycin application is difficult to reverse and affects endogenous targets, other systems have been developed (DeRose et al, 2013;Voß et al, 2015;Kim et al, 2016), including light-controlled GA 3 (Schelkle et al, 2015) and photocaged ABA (Wright et al, 2015). Such orthogonal systems, including light-controlled small molecules, represent a new frontier in chemical biology.…”

Drive the Car(go)s—New Modalities to Control Cargo Trafficking in Live Cells

“…This system has allowed for directional control of mitochondria or peroxisome trafficking in neurons. Other optochemical systems, such as those based on photocaged rapamycin (Karginov et al, 2011; Umeda et al, 2011), chemically modified abscisic acid (Wright et al, 2015; Zeng et al, 2015) and gibberellic acid (Schelkle et al, 2015), photoactivatable crosslinker for SNAPTag and HaloTag (Zimmermann et al, 2014), are also expected to achieve similar optochemical control.…”

Molecular tools for acute spatiotemporal manipulation of signal transduction

“…These tools include a wide range of photoactivatable metal ions, amino acids, second messengers, ligands and other pharmacological agents. Furthermore, photocaged versions of chemical dimerizers, such as photocaged analogues of rapamycin [25], ABA [26], GA 3 [27], and HaXS [28], allow researchers to combine the aforementioned CID systems with light activation (Figure 2a). Likewise, creating photocleavable dimerizers provides a method to engineer rapid reversibility into otherwise irreversible CID systems [29].…”