One-sentence summaryWe compared the performances of several different fluorescent protein pairs to study membrane protein interaction in plants with FRET.
Authors contributions:GD conceived the project and designed the experiments with input from all authors. GD prepared the figures and wrote the manuscript with the help of RS. GD and PS created expression vectors and performed measurements. GD, PS, and SH analyzed the data. SH and SWP provided critical help with lifetime measurement and analysis. All authors discussed the results and commented on the manuscript.
AbstractReceptor-like kinases (RLK) and receptor-like proteins (RLP) often interact in a combinatorial manner depending on tissue identity, membrane domains, or endo-and exogenous cues, and the same RLKs or RLPs can generate different signaling outputs depending on the composition of the receptor complexes they are involved in. Investigation of their interaction partners in a spatial and dynamic way is therefore of prime interest to understand their functions. This is however limited by the technical complexity of assessing it in endogenous conditions. A solution to close this gap is to determine protein interaction directly in the relevant tissues at endogenous expression levels using Förster resonance energy transfer (FRET). The ideal fluorophore pair for FRET must, however, fulfil specific requirements: (i) the emission and excitation spectra of the donor and acceptor, respectively, must overlap; (ii) they should not interfere with proper folding, activity, or localization of the fusion proteins; (iii) they should be sufficiently photostable in plant cells. Furthermore, the donor must yield sufficient photon counts at near-endogenous protein expression levels. Although many fluorescent proteins were reported to be suitable for FRET experiments, only a handful were already described for applications in plants. Herein, we compare a range of fluorophores, assess their usability to study RLK interactions by FRET-based fluorescence lifetime imaging (FLIM) and explore their differences in FRET efficiency. Our analysis will help to select the optimal fluorophore pair for diverse FRET applications. be part of different complexes with different signaling specificity (Liebrand et al., 2014; Bücherl et al., 2017; Wan et al., 2019). Most studies of RLK interaction initially relied on in vitro experiments, and could not provide insights into the spatial localization and complexity of interactions. However, advances in imaging techniques now allow to study co-localization and interactions of RLKs in living plant cells (Somssich et al., 2015; Bücherl et al., 2017). In particular, Förster Resonance Energy Transfer (FRET) is an attractive technique as it allows to resolve protein-protein interactions in live plants in a cell-specific and dynamic manner (Somssich et al., 2015; Long et al., 2017; Weidtkamp-Peters and Stahl, 2017; Lampugnani et al., 2018). Determination of protein interaction by FRET relies on the energy transfer from a fluorescent donor to an accept...