Sigma® Life Science, Sigma-Aldrich’s biological products and services business, signed an agreement to distribute worldwide Olink Bioscience’s Duolink® In Situ products, which present a new method for imaging and measuring protein-protein interactions in unmodified cells.

The Duolink In Situ products work in tandem with Sigma Life Science’s antibody portfolio and will allow researchers to target the precise protein of interest and enable analyses and imaging. The technology, among other applications, can be used in combination with CompoZr® Zinc Finger Nuclease-mediated gene editing to track knocked-out or knocked-in genes and with MISSION® RNA interference technologies to track protein expression following gene knockdown.

“The ability to visualize these protein-protein interactions in unmodified cells under endogenous expression and at very low levels is a fundamental advance that allows greater insight into basic biology, pathways, spatial phenomena, and potential therapeutic targets in those pathways,” said Josef Zihlmann, vice president at Sigma Life Science.

According to the company, the PLA® technology allows Olink’s Duolink In Situ products to quickly image the locations of single protein-protein interactions regardless of strength, measure protein expression levels, and identify relative changes in post-translational modification events. The technique relies upon two target-specific primary antibodies, a plus and minus pair of species-specific PLA probes conjugated to DNA oligos that—when a target pair of proteins are in close proximity—can hybridize to trigger a rolling circle amplification reaction. Fluorescent detection probes bind the several hundred-fold amplified DNA at high density, allowing visualization of single protein–protein interactions inside an intact cell using a standard fluorescence microscope.

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