Watching proteins in the wild: Fluorescence methods to study protein dynamics in living cells

The advent of GFP imaging has led to a revolution in the study of live cell protein dynamics. Ease of access to fluorescently tagged proteins has led to their widespread application and demonstrated the power of studying prot ein dynamics in living cells. This has spurred development of next generati on approaches enabling not only the visualization of protein movements, but correlation of a protein's dynamics with its changing structural state or ligand binding. Such methods make use of fluorescence resonance energy tran sfer and dyes that report changes in their environment, and take advantage of new chemistries for site-specific protein labeling.