Trends in Biological Optical Microscopy

Data storage based on photochromic and photoconvertible fluorescent proteins

“…For example, variants of FPs have been designed that serve as pH sensors McAnaney et al, 2002;Hess et al, 2004;Remington et al, 2004;McAnaney et al, 2005), calcium sensors (Miyawaki et al, 1997;Nagai et al, 2004), zinc sensors (Evers et al, 2008), ADP/ATP sensors (Berg et al, 2009), generators (Bulina et al, 2006) or sensors (Markvicheva et al, 2008) of reactive oxygen species, timers for gene expression (Terskikh et al, 2000) or for monitoring of timedependent expression of proteins (Li et al, 2000;Shibasaki et al, 2003). More recently, the use of photoactivatable fluorescent proteins (PAFPs) contributed to the development of super-resolution microscopy schemes (Doose, 2008;Heilemann et al, 2009a) such as (F)PALM (Betzig et al, 2006;Hess et al, 2006)/(d)STORM (Rust et al, 2006;Heilemann et al, 2008;van de Linde et al, 2008;Heilemann et al, 2009b;van de Linde et al, 2009). The potential of PAFPs for nanobiotechnology applications, notably as being the active medium in novel biological data storage devices, has been suggested several times (Dickson et al, 1997;Andresen et al, 2005;Sauer, 2005;Schafer et al, 2008).…”