The macromolecular crowding effect--from in vitro into the cell

Biological Chemistry
David Gnutt, Simon Ebbinghaus

Abstract

The influence of the cellular milieu, a complex and crowded solvent, is often neglected when biomolecular structure and function are studied in vitro. To mimic the cellular environment, crowding effects are commonly induced in vitro using artificial crowding agents like Ficoll or dextran. However, it is unclear if such effects are also observed in cellulo. Diverging results on protein stability in living cells point out the need for new quantitative methods to investigate the contributions of excluded volume and nonspecific interactions to the cellular crowding effect. We show how new crowding sensitive probes may be utilized to directly investigate crowding effects in living cells. Moreover, we discuss processes where crowding effects could play a crucial role in molecular cell biology.

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Methods Mentioned

BETA
protein folding
circular
differential scanning calorimetry
fluorescence microscopy
NMR
FRET
biosensors
peptide folding
nuclear magnetic resonance

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