Fluorescence Intensity of Protein Tags Is Dependent on Their Subcellular Location

TL;DR

This paper shows that fluorescent protein tags can give misleading results about protein locations due to differences in their sensitivity to local pH and microenvironment.

Contribution

The study reveals that fluorescent protein tags can show different subcellular distributions for the same protein depending on their pKa and local microenvironment.

Findings

EGFP-tagged proteins showed significant distribution discrepancies compared to mCherry-tagged proteins in cytoplasmic organelles.

FPs with low pKas like mTurquoise and mCerulean showed consistent distributions across different tags.

Results suggest cytoplasmic surfaces of organelles have variable microenvironments affecting FP fluorescence.

Abstract

Fluorescent protein (FP) tagging is widely used in imaging experiments to investigate the subcellular distribution of proteins. However, because the fluorescence of most FP chromophores is quenched upon their protonation, their fluorescence intensities are dependent on their pKas and on the environmental pH. Thus, the concentration of a protein tagged with EGFP (pKa = 6.0) is dramatically underestimated in the lysosomal lumen (pH ~4.7) compared to that of the same protein tagged with mCherry (pKa = 4.5). In this study, we examined the effect of differential FP tagging on the apparent subcellular distribution of several proteins that reside on the cytoplasmic surfaces of secretory/endocytic organelles. Due to the presumed uniformity of cytoplasmic conditions (pH ~7.2–7.4), we expected to find essentially complete overlap of fluorescent signals, regardless of the nature of the fused FP. However, we were surprised to observe significant discrepancies in the apparent distributions of a subset of proteins tagged with EGFP vs. mCherry (Pearson’s correlation coefficients of about 0.80). These discrepancies were not evident when comparing proteins tagged with mCherry vs. other FPs with low pKas (e.g., mTurquoise (pKa = 4.5), mCerulean (pKa = 3.2)) (Pearson’s correlation coefficients of about 0.90–0.95). Our results suggest that FP tags may be sensitive to the microenvironments on the cytoplasmic surfaces of different organelles.

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