Single molecule narrowfield microscopy of protein-DNA binding dynamics in glucose signal transduction of live yeast cells

Abstract: Single-molecule narrowfield microscopy is a versatile tool to investigate a diverse range of protein dynamics in live cells and has been extensively used in bacteria. Here, we describe how these methods can be extended to larger eukaryotic, yeast cells, which contain sub-cellular compartments. We describe how to obtain single-molecule microscopy data but also how to analyse these data to track and obtain the stoichiometry of molecular complexes diffusing in the cell. We chose glucose mediated signal transduction of live yeast cells as the system to demonstrate these single-molecule techniques as transcriptional regulation is fundamentally a single molecule problem - a single repressor protein binding a single binding site in the genome can dramatically alter behaviour at the whole cell and population level.