Issue 7, 2022

HydroFlipper membrane tension probes: imaging membrane hydration and mechanical compression simultaneously in living cells

Abstract

HydroFlippers are introduced as the first fluorescent membrane tension probes that report simultaneously on membrane compression and hydration. The probe design is centered around a sensing cycle that couples the mechanical planarization of twisted push–pull fluorophores with the dynamic covalent hydration of their exocyclic acceptor. In FLIM images of living cells, tension-induced deplanarization is reported as a decrease in fluorescence lifetime of the dehydrated mechanophore. Membrane hydration is reported as the ratio of the photon counts associated to the hydrated and dehydrated mechanophores in reconvoluted lifetime frequency histograms. Trends for tension-induced decompression and hydration of cellular membranes of interest (MOIs) covering plasma membrane, lysosomes, mitochondria, ER, and Golgi are found not to be the same. Tension-induced changes in mechanical compression are rather independent of the nature of the MOI, while the responsiveness to changes in hydration are highly dependent on the intrinsic order of the MOI. These results confirm the mechanical planarization of push–pull probes in the ground state as most robust mechanism to routinely image membrane tension in living cells, while the availability of simultaneous information on membrane hydration will open new perspectives in mechanobiology.

Graphical abstract: HydroFlipper membrane tension probes: imaging membrane hydration and mechanical compression simultaneously in living cells

Supplementary files

Article information

Article type
Edge Article
Submitted
20 Sept. 2021
Accepted
22 Janv. 2022
First published
03 Febr. 2022
This article is Open Access

All publication charges for this article have been paid for by the Royal Society of Chemistry
Creative Commons BY-NC license

Chem. Sci., 2022,13, 2086-2093

HydroFlipper membrane tension probes: imaging membrane hydration and mechanical compression simultaneously in living cells

J. García-Calvo, J. López-Andarias, J. Maillard, V. Mercier, C. Roffay, A. Roux, A. Fürstenberg, N. Sakai and S. Matile, Chem. Sci., 2022, 13, 2086 DOI: 10.1039/D1SC05208J

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