I ♥ γ's

I'm a sucker for new ways to get more photons out of your sample, so this one struck me as pretty neat. Metal-enhanced fluorescence has some huge advantages, and this looks like a great way to improve your fluorescence yield a lot without having to change your assay around too much: just deposit a monolayer of silver nanoparticles on the coverslip surface, and presto! Instant gratification. It doesn't sound like a huge chore to make the coverslips, although it's not a walk in the park either. But hopefully somebody will start selling something like this soon, and you can just buy it off the shelf.

The Mighty Myosin

Takeshi Sakamoto (warning, absurdly large image of Takeshi on this web page) from Jim Sellers' lab has a paper in Nature this week on myosin Va. (Takeshi hung out at the Selvin lab a few times and he's a nice guy.) By using a fluorescent ATP (deac-aminoATP) analog that increases its fluorescence 25-fold when docked into the myosin, they were able to visualize ATP and ADP binding and unbinding from the myosin, while simultaneously visualizing stepwise by localizing the flurophores, thus allowing them to determine at what point in the mechanochemical cycle the ATP binds and the ATP unbinds. This is a big problem for a lot of motor molecule researchers, so hopefully this will be a new technique in the arsenal.

Speaking of myosin V, it is apparently now official that Ahmet Yildiz has started a position at Berkeley in the physics department. Congrats!