Lawrence Lab Uses Light to Create Three-Button Remote for Bioreagents

Chemical Biology and Medicinal Chemistry Divisions Research,

Grayson Mendenhall
August 17, 2012

Researchers at the UNC Eshelman School of Pharmacy have demonstrated a technique to selectively activate bioreagents such as inhibitors, enzymes, and sensors within a cell using three different wavelengths of light.

The team’s findings are published in the June 27 issue of Angewandte Chemie.

“Imagine that you have an inhibitor that is inert but can be made active by light,” says David Lawrence, PhD, senior author of the study. “It is slowly taken up by the cell and floats around everywhere. Light allows you to switch that inhibitor on instantaneously. And by focusing the light on one area of the cell, you can activate the inhibitor only in that area.” (See a video of the technique.)

The technique described in the article uses three wavelengths of light to activate different bioreagents in the same cell, offering a high degree of temporal and spatial resolution that one would not get with a conventional inhibitor, enzyme, or sensor, Lawrence says. The process could be used as a tool to study signaling pathways, which are incredibly complex, fast acting, and localized to different areas within cells, he says.

Light at a long wavelength could switch on an enzyme, followed by light of a shorter wavelength activating a sensor to detect the activity of the enzyme, Lawrence says, while an even shorter wavelength to turn on an inhibitor to block the action of the enzyme, although he adds that nothing this sophisticated has yet been done.

“Basically, we have a way to communicate with a bioreagent once it’s in the cell. It’s like a remote control: we can press a button and say, ‘We want you to be active right here, right now.’”

Lawrence is a Fred Eshelman Distinguished Professor and chair of the School’s Division of Chemical Biology and Medicinal Chemistry. His coauthors on the paper are Melanie Priestman, PhD, and Thomas Shell, PhD, of UNC-Chapel Hill; Liang Sun, PhD, of Pharmaron-Beijing BDA; and Hsien-Ming Lee, PhD, of Academia Sinica, Taiwan.