Glowing proteins give York researchers new key insights into cellular components

Under the leadership of Dr Abi Perrin and Professor Luke Mackinder, in the Centre for Novel Agricultural Products (CNAP), the group of researchers in the CyanoTag project tagged hundreds of samples of the Synechococcus elongatus bacteria with a protein that glows. By doing this, they were able to produce images and a 3D atlas that showcase how key cellular components are organised within the cell. 

Important contribution

Cyanobacteria make an important contribution to global carbon dioxide fixation and play a vital role in maintaining the Earth’s atmosphere and ecosystem. Despite making up 20 percent of all photosynthesis, cyanobacteria are less well studied than, for example, their distant relative chloroplasts which are found in plants.

Professor Mackinder said “There are many gaps in our understanding of how proteins are spatially organised within a cell and how their organisation and networks change in response to environmental changes. 

“Whilst most studies focus on a single protein, we wanted to rapidly expand our knowledge by developing methods to enable the study of 100’s of proteins in parallel. The data is giving us exciting insights into many cellular processes including photosynthesis and cell division.”

Light analysis

As well as showing the locations of over 300 proteins, the project also performed an analysis to ask how some of the cellular components changed their location during light and dark conditions.

The team was able to study key components of the photosynthetic apparatus coming together and falling apart as they varied the amount of light the bacteria was exposed to. 

This provided insight into how the bacterium dynamically regulates these processes on a daily basis. Another analysis studied which parts of the cell interact with others in order to form an interaction map, or ‘interactome’, of how the inside of the cell is arranged.

Accessible dataset

The images and datasets produced within the project provide a wealth of information, and in order to make their results and data accessible to the wider research community, the CyanoTag project partnered with the University of York-run web-platform MORF, led by Professor Gavin Thomas. 

The MORF database provides both long-term data storage as well as means of dissemination. The data from the project held there provides a rich resource for scientists all over the globe to analyse, and can be used to help in designing future experiments aimed at understanding and exploiting the biology of this fascinating cyanobacterium. 

Dr Joyce Bennett, MORF CEO, said “We were delighted to be asked to present this valuable dataset in an intuitive interactive web page for the research community to browse. Using the MORF framework, we’ve built a database of protein abundance, localisation and interactions that can be explored without expert bioinformatic skills.”