A novel imaging technique for probing detailed biomolecular interactions

Abstract

Biological imaging techniques have been dramatically advanced recently. Single-molecule real-time visualization has been making a great breakthrough for investigating biological phenomena. Here we introduce a novel single-molecule imaging technique called DNA curtain that is a hybrid system concatenating nano-fabrication, microfluidics, lipid fluidity, and total internal reflection fluorescence micmicroscopy. The DNA curtain system provides a universal platform for probing diverse protein-DNA interactions in a direct manner. Using the DNA curtain, we reveal how DNA damage repair proteins search for DNA damage. We demonstrated that the DNA damage repair proteins diffuse along DNA via hopping mechanism.