Principal Investigator Barbara Imperiali
The group develops and implements new organic fluorophores and luminescent lanthanide complexes. Chelation-enhanced and environment-sensitive fluorophores have been introduced and reagents integrating these fluorophores are valuable for protein kinase sensing and the detection of macromolecular interactions respectively. Luminescent peptide-based lanthanide binding tags (LBTs), developed in collaboration with the Allen lab comprise short peptide sequences that are engineered to avidly bind to trivalent lanthanide (Ln3+) ions. LBT sequences impart on fusion proteins a specific lanthanide-binding site for applications that rely upon the unique photophysical properties of the bound complex including advantageous properties for NMR, X-ray crystallography and LRET.