bioRxiv preprint doi: https://doi.org/10.1101/541805; this version posted September 5, 2019. The copyright holder for this preprint (which was not certified by peer review) is the author/funder. All rights reserved. No reuse allowed without permission. Optical measurement of endogenous ion channel voltage sensor activation in tissue Authors Parashar Thapa1‡, Robert Stewart1‡, Rebecka J. Sepela1, Oscar Vivas2, Laxmi K. Parajuli2, Mark Lillya1, Sebastian Fletcher-Taylor1, Bruce E. Cohen3, Karen Zito2, Jon T. Sack1* 1Department of Physiology and Membrane Biology, University of California, Davis, CA 95616 2Center for Neuroscience, University of California, Davis, CA 95616 3Molecular Foundry, Lawrence Berkeley National Laboratory, Berkeley, CA 94720 ‡Authors contributed equally to this work *Correspondence to
[email protected] 1 bioRxiv preprint doi: https://doi.org/10.1101/541805; this version posted September 5, 2019. The copyright holder for this preprint (which was not certified by peer review) is the author/funder. All rights reserved. No reuse allowed without permission. 1 Abstract 2 A primary goal of molecular physiology is to understand how conformational changes of 3 proteins affect the function of cells, tissues, and organisms. Here, we describe an imaging 4 method for measuring the conformational changes of a voltage-sensing protein within tissue. We 5 synthesized a fluorescent molecular probe, compatible with two-photon microscopy, that targets 6 a resting conformation of Kv2-type voltage gated K+ channel proteins. Voltage-response 7 characteristics were used to calibrate a statistical thermodynamic model relating probe labeling 8 intensity to the conformations adopted by unlabeled Kv2 proteins. Two-photon imaging of rat 9 brain slices labeled with the probe revealed fluorescence consistent with conformation-selective 10 labeling of endogenous neuronal Kv2 proteins.