Exploration of Biarsenical Chemistry - Challenges in Protein Research

Here is a review article about a class of fluorophores, biarsenical probes, that be attached to a target protein containing (engineered to contain) a 4-cyseteine motif - CCXXCC- . While free molecules are virtually non-fluorescent, binding to this motif produces specific tagging with high fluoresence in-vivo. Cysteine makes a logical target because of its relative low abundance and high nucleophilicity. The authors suggest that this technology has the ability to be applied to many other techniques in biology, either for measurement -, FRET, Purification of proteins, electron microscopy or alteration of the system - such as Enzyme activity switching, or linking interacting proteins .