In the autumn of 2014, we presented new stains to conduct live cell imaging of Actin and Tubulin, which I covered in my post 2 new Actin and Tubulin live-cell imaging stains – without transfection!

Fig 1: Live MCF10A cells spheroid stained with SiR-DNA and imaged by confocal microscopy. Courtesy of C. Conrad and K. Jechow (Heidelberg).

SiR-Actin and SiR-Tubulin exhibit a number of benefits which have since then be experienced by a huge number of labs all over the world:

• No transfection
• No washing steps
• No toxic effects if used in the concentration range recommended
• Excellent brightness
• Far-red excitation & emission
• Deep tissue penetration and minimal background
• Multiple fluorescent stainings with other dyes possible
• Compatible with Superresolution microscopic techniques

Since then, Spirochrome has added another stain with the same benefits: SiR-DNA, a far-red, fluorogenic, cell permeable and highly specific probe for DNA (see Fig 1).

SLAS – High Content Screening Conference

From June 27th to June 29th, the SLAS – High Content Screening Conference took place in Dresden/Germany. The conference focussed on new essays and novel microscopy techniques.

Spirochrome and tebu-bio were selected to present a poster about the features of SiR-stains, which are excellent tools for phenotypic screening and high content screening (HCS) approaches.

If you are interested in learning more about these exciting live cell imaging tools, don’t hesitate to download our joint poster:

Fluorogenic probes for live-cell imaging of intracellular targets

Any questions or comments? Please feel free to contact me with the form below!

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RIPA buffer is one of the most useful protein extraction buffers and maintains most native structures of proteins. Nevertheless, RIPA buffer is not convenient enough to extract membrane proteins and membrane-associated proteins concentrated in lipid raft.

Lipid raft is a highly unique microdomain on the lipid bilayer which contains special lipids, cholesterol and functional proteins. In this layer, lipid raft-enriched proteins are usually insoluble in mild detergent buffers such as 1% Triton X-100 and RIPA buffer. Consequently, it was, up to now, difficult to analyze the functions of this kind of proteins.