Abstract
Membrane voltage (Vm) is a fundamental biological parameter that is essential for neuronal communication, cardiac activity, transmembrane transport, regulation of signaling, and bacterial motility. Optical measurements of Vm promise new insights into how voltage propagates within and between cells, but effective optical contrast agents have been lacking. Microbial rhodopsin-based fluorescent voltage indicators are exquisitely sensitive and fast, but very dim, necessitating careful attention to experimental procedures. This chapter describes how to make optical voltage measurements with microbial rhodopsins.
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Acknowledgments
This work was supported by the Harvard Center for Brain Science, ONR grant N000141110-549, NIH grants 1-R01-EB012498-01 and New Innovator grant 1-DP2-OD007428, the Harvard/MIT Joint Research Grants Program in Basic Neuroscience, a Sloan Foundation Fellowship, and a Dreyfus Teacher Scholar Award. D.R.H is supported by an NSF graduate research fellowship.
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Cohen, A.E., Hochbaum, D.R. (2014). Measuring Membrane Voltage with Microbial Rhodopsins. In: Zhang, J., Ni, Q., Newman, R. (eds) Fluorescent Protein-Based Biosensors. Methods in Molecular Biology, vol 1071. Humana Press, Totowa, NJ. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-1-62703-622-1_8
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DOI: https://doi.org/10.1007/978-1-62703-622-1_8
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