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Rather than rely on exogenous reporters to monitor gene expression, a team of researchers has generated a transgenic mouse with fluorescently labeled endogenous mRNA. In 2011, Lionnet et al. published a report in Nature Methods describing a transgenic mouse that expresses an array of binding sites for the MS2 bacteriophage capsid protein (MCP) in the 3′ untranslated region of the β-actin gene. Park et al. have now crossed this mouse with a strain expressing an MCP-GFP fusion, which allowed them to follow MCP-GFP–labeled endogenous β-actin in all mouse tissues. They looked at expression patterns and localization dynamics of β-actin in primary fibroblasts and cultured neurons as well as acute brain slices and saw different modes of localization in the different cell types.
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Single-transcript dynamics in a live mouse. Nat Methods 11, 370 (2014). https://doi.org/10.1038/nmeth.2906
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DOI: https://doi.org/10.1038/nmeth.2906