Visulization of a single molecule in a living cell

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The purpose of this project is to visualize real-time images of molecules in living cells. To test this, I employed the evanescence microscopy and the confocal microscopy with a microlens-attached Nipkow disk scanner. By these techniques, catecholamine release from chromaffin vesicles and gating activity of K-cahnnels expressed in Xenopus oocytes were captured as dynamic 2-dimesnional images.Exocytotic release of catecholamine was visualized by first loading a fluorescent dye, quinacrine, into chromaffin vesicles, and then by observing the fluorescence of the dye with the confocal microscope equipped with an objective lens of a high numerical aperture. It was found that some vesicles release their contents only partially and recycle without a full release. This findings do not support the widely accepted hypothesis of quantal release of tranamitters.Messenger RNA for K-channel was modified at 351 position, so that K-channel expressed in Xenpus oocytes injected with the mRNA can be specifically labeled with tetramthyl rhodamine maleimide (TMRM). Under the voltage clamp condition, the fluorescence of TMRM on the oocyte membrane was examined with the evanescence microscope. Many fluorescent spots showed voltage dependent changes in brightness (50% in amplitude with 100mV depolarization) that reflects the gating process of the ion channel. Moreover, with the time of illumination these spots disappeared abruptly in a mode of quantal bleaching, as expected for a single fluorescent molecule. This is evidence for the first observation of single molecules on the plasma membrane in a livinf cell.