Linker molecules convert commercial fluorophores into tailored functional probes during biolabeling

Fluorescence techniques are indispensable tools at the heart of basic research, medical diagnostics, cancer research, personalized medicine and drug screening.

Their merits are not limited by physical instrumentation, but by the performance and properties of the employed fluorescent probes.

All commercially available fluorophores with a market potential of 2 billion per year and an annual growth rate of ~8% suffer from three fundamental problems: (i) Phototoxicity and poor signal quality, (ii) requirement for functional properties such as blinking emission, sensor capabilities or high photostability, and (iii) their limitations to be used in more than one specific application, e.g., for lipid-staining, organelle marking, DNA sequencing or single-molecule detection.

Consequences of these problems can be loss of information in biomedical assays (e.g., via a too rapidly vanishing signal) resulting for example in an incorrect medical diagnosis or false positive hits in drug screening. My lab has developed a solution to these fundamental problems within the context of my ERC starting grant SM-IMPORT.

We established a versatile class of linker compounds that allow selective labelling of biological targets in vitro and in vivo with a (commercial) fluorophore, which becomes tuneable in all of its properties via the linker.

With such a simple strategy, users in all branches of academic and industry research, but also in biomedicine will be able to modify properties of commercially available fluorophores preserving their standard labelling protocols reducing assay costs and improving reliability. In this proof-of-concept grant, I want to explore the potential of our established linker library for commercial use.