Modulating signalling lifetime to optimise a prototypical animal opsin for optogenetic applications.

ABSTRACT: Animal opsins are light activated G-protein-coupled receptors, capable of optogenetic control of G-protein signalling for research or therapeutic applications. Animal opsins offer excellent photosensitivity, but their temporal resolution can be limited by long photoresponse duration when expressed outside their native cellular environment. Here, we explore methods for addressing this limitation for a prototypical animal opsin (human rod opsin) in HEK293T cells. We find that the application of the canonical rhodopsin kinase (GRK1)/visual arrestin signal termination mechanism to this problem is complicated by a generalised suppressive effect of GRK1 expression. This attenuation can be overcome using phosphorylation-independent mutants of arrestin, especially when these are tethered to the op

SUBMITTER: Rodgers J 

PROVIDER: S-EPMC10730688 | biostudies-literature | 2023 Dec

REPOSITORIES: biostudies-literature