Linker molecules convert commercial fluorophores into tailored functional probes during biolabeling

Introduction

Fluorescence techniques are indispensable tools at the heart of basic research, medical diagnostics, cancer research, personalized medicine, and drug screening. Their merits are not limited by physical instrumentation, but by the performance and properties of the employed fluorescent probes.

Challenges with Current Fluorophores

All commercially available fluorophores – with a market potential of 2 billion € per year and an annual growth rate of ~8% – suffer from three fundamental problems:

1. Phototoxicity and poor signal quality.
2. Requirement for functional properties such as blinking emission, sensor capabilities, or high photostability.
3. Limitations to be used in more than one specific application, e.g., for lipid-staining, organelle marking, DNA sequencing, or single-molecule detection.

Consequences of these problems can be loss of information in biomedical assays (e.g., via a too rapidly vanishing signal), resulting in an incorrect medical diagnosis or false positive hits in drug screening.

Proposed Solution

My lab has developed a solution to these fundamental problems within the context of my ERC starting grant “SM-IMPORT”. We established a versatile class of ‘linker’ compounds that allow selective labelling of biological targets in vitro and in vivo with a (commercial) fluorophore, which becomes tuneable in all of its properties via the linker.

Benefits of the Linker Strategy

With such a simple strategy, users in all branches of academic and industry research, but also in biomedicine, will be able to modify properties of commercially available fluorophores while preserving their standard labelling protocols. This approach aims to:

• Reduce assay costs.
• Improve reliability.

Future Exploration

In this proof-of-concept grant, I want to explore the potential of our established linker library for commercial use.