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. Author manuscript; available in PMC: 2022 Mar 25.
Published in final edited form as: Methods Mol Biol. 2019;2038:3–20. doi: 10.1007/978-1-4939-9674-2_1

Fig. 1.

Fig. 1

Detection of single mRNAs with the MS2-MCP system. The left panel is a snapshot of a live cell expressing mRNAs tagged with the MS2-MCP system. Expression of MCP fused to GFP is restricted to the nucleus of the cell. Single mRNA molecules are observed in the cytoplasm as discrete bright spots, as an example, one mRNA is indicated with a green square. The panel on the right is a scheme of an mRNA tagged in the 3′-UTR with the MS2-MCP system. Usually an array of 24 stem loops is inserted. The blue stars indicate the position of the nucleotide (U or C) in the loop that influences the binding affinity of the MCP and differentiates the low to the high affinity MS2 versions. The length of the linker between the loops differentiates the MS2V6 from the MS2V7 version. Scale bar is 5 μm