Autophagy Biosensors

Autophagy is a highly regulated homeostatic degradative process where cells destroy their own components via the lysosomal machinery and recycle them. This process plays both protective and deleterious roles in many diseases, including Alzheimer’s disease, aging, cancer, infection and Crohn’s disease. Elucidating the correlation between autophagy and apoptotic cell death has become the focus of a great deal of research. Members of the LC3 family play a key role in the maturation of the autophagosome. Lysosomal turnover of the autophagosome marker LC3-II reflects starvation-induced autophagic activity, and detecting LC3 by immunoblotting or immunofluorescence has become a reliable method for monitoring autophagy and autophagy-related processes, including autophagic cell death.

Autophagy is a self-degradative process in cell that is important for balancing sources of energy at critical times in development and in response to nutrient stress. For autophagy study, Genemedi supply autophagy biosensor, in which GFP and/or RFP tags are fused at the C-termini of the autophagosome marker LC3, allowing to detect the intensity of autophagy flux in real-time with more accuracy, clarity and intuitiveness. These biosensors provide an enhanced dissection of the maturation of the autophagosome to the autolysosome, which capitalizes on the pH difference between the acidic autolysosome and the neutral autophagosome. The acid-sensitive GFP will be degraded in autolysosome whereas the acid-insensitive RFP will not. Therefore, the change from autophagosome to autolysosome can be visualized by imaging the specific loss of the GFP fluorescence, leaving only red fluorescence.

For autophagy study, Genemedi supply autophagy flux biosensors encoded by AAV, Adenovirus and lentivirus, which can be used to observe autophagy flux and monitor the intensity of autophagy flux in real-time in vivo or in vitro. Welcome to email [email protected] for consultation.