scholarly journals Multiplexed fluorescence imaging of GPCR downstream signaling dynamics at the single-cell level

2021 ◽  
Author(s):  
Ryosuke Tany ◽  
Yuhei Goto ◽  
Yohei Kondo ◽  
Kazuhiro Aoki

AbstractG-protein-coupled receptors (GPCRs) play an important role in sensing various extracellular stimuli, such as neurotransmitters, hormones, and tastants, and transducing the input information into the cell. While the human genome encodes more than 800 GPCR genes, only four Gα-proteins (Gαs, Gαi/o, Gαq/11, and Gα12/13) are known to couple with GPCRs. It remains unclear how such divergent GPCR information is translated into the downstream G-protein signaling dynamics. To answer this question, we report a multiplexed fluorescence imaging system for monitoring GPCR downstream signaling dynamics at the single-cell level. Genetically encoded biosensors for cAMP, Ca2+, RhoA, and ERK were selected as markers for GPCR downstream signaling, and were stably expressed in HeLa cells. GPCR was further transiently overexpressed in the cells. As a proof-of-concept, we visualized GPCR signaling dynamics of 5 dopamine receptors and 12 serotonin receptors, and found heterogeneity between GPCRs and between cells. Even when the same Gα proteins were known to be coupled, the patterns of dynamics in GPCR downstream signaling, including the signal strength and duration, were substantially distinct among GPCRs. These results suggest the importance of dynamical encoding in GPCR signaling.

2020 ◽  
Vol 21 (21) ◽  
pp. 7880
Author(s):  
Leonore Mensching ◽  
Sebastian Rading ◽  
Viacheslav Nikolaev ◽  
Meliha Karsak

G-protein coupled cannabinoid CB2 receptor signaling and function is primarily mediated by its inhibitory effect on adenylate cyclase. The visualization and monitoring of agonist dependent dynamic 3′,5′-cyclic adenosine monophosphate (cAMP) signaling at the single cell level is still missing for CB2 receptors. This paper presents an application of a live cell imaging while using a Förster resonance energy transfer (FRET)-based biosensor, Epac1-camps, for quantification of cAMP. We established HEK293 cells stably co-expressing human CB2 and Epac1-camps and quantified cAMP responses upon Forskolin pre-stimulation, followed by treatment with the CB2 ligands JWH-133, HU308, β-caryophyllene, or 2-arachidonoylglycerol. We could identify cells showing either an agonist dependent CB2-response as expected, cells displaying no response, and cells with constitutive receptor activity. In Epac1-CB2-HEK293 responder cells, the terpenoid β-caryophyllene significantly modified the cAMP response through CB2. For all of the tested ligands, a relatively high proportion of cells with constitutively active CB2 receptors was identified. Our method enabled the visualization of intracellular dynamic cAMP responses to the stimuli at single cell level, providing insights into the nature of heterologous CB2 expression systems that contributes to the understanding of Gαi-mediated G-Protein coupled receptor (GPCR) signaling in living cells and opens up possibilities for future investigations of endogenous CB2 responses.


1998 ◽  
Author(s):  
Hakim Fekkar ◽  
N. Benbernou ◽  
S. Esnault ◽  
H. C. Shin ◽  
Moncef Guenounou

2019 ◽  
Author(s):  
Ruixin Wang ◽  
Dongni Wang ◽  
Dekai Kang ◽  
Xusen Guo ◽  
Chong Guo ◽  
...  

BACKGROUND In vitro human cell line models have been widely used for biomedical research to predict clinical response, identify novel mechanisms and drug response. However, one-fifth to one-third of cell lines have been cross-contaminated, which can seriously result in invalidated experimental results, unusable therapeutic products and waste of research funding. Cell line misidentification and cross-contamination may occur at any time, but authenticating cell lines is infrequent performed because the recommended genetic approaches are usually require extensive expertise and may take a few days. Conversely, the observation of live-cell morphology is a direct and real-time technique. OBJECTIVE The purpose of this study was to construct a novel computer vision technology based on deep convolutional neural networks (CNN) for “cell face” recognition. This was aimed to improve cell identification efficiency and reduce the occurrence of cell-line cross contamination. METHODS Unstained optical microscopy images of cell lines were obtained for model training (about 334 thousand patch images), and testing (about 153 thousand patch images). The AI system first trained to recognize the pure cell morphology. In order to find the most appropriate CNN model,we explored the key image features in cell morphology classification tasks using the classical CNN model-Alexnet. After that, a preferred fine-grained recognition model BCNN was used for the cell type identification (seven classifications). Next, we simulated the situation of cell cross-contamination and mixed the cells in pairs at different ratios. The detection of the cross-contamination was divided into two levels, whether the cells are mixed and what the contaminating cell is. The specificity, sensitivity, and accuracy of the model were tested separately by external validation. Finally, the segmentation model DialedNet was used to present the classification results at the single cell level. RESULTS The cell texture and density were the influencing factors that can be better recognized by the bilinear convolutional neural network (BCNN) comparing to AlexNet. The BCNN achieved 99.5% accuracy in identifying seven pure cell lines and 86.3% accuracy for detecting cross-contamination (mixing two of the seven cell lines). DilatedNet was applied to the semantic segment for analyzing in single-cell level and achieved an accuracy of 98.2%. CONCLUSIONS This study successfully demonstrated that cell lines can be morphologically identified using deep learning models. Only light-microscopy images and no reagents are required, enabling most labs to routinely perform cell identification tests.


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