A picture used to paint a thousand words. But with the advent of multiple color imaging, microscopy can open a lens with which to view life that few other techniques are capable of. We are thus going to take you on a colorful tour that will show you specific fluorophores, explain why different fluorophores have different colors, and how to rationalize why a molecule is fluorescent. Then we will use these fluorophores in cells, to visualize important cellular processes.

Here we will discuss how different fluorescent techniques have found fantastically useful applications to understand specific biological regulation processes in vitro and in live cells. We will focus on chromatin regulation and regulation of membrane tension as these are two systems which, without such techniques, we would not have the level of understanding we have today.

The classical view of biological science is the laboratory worker working hard to understand a specific protein of interest. But through chemical biology, we have been able to employ proteins to do some of this important work for us. In this module you will learn how to deploy modified protein domains to perform custom-designed functions using light-based techniques as a readout.

In recent years numerous chemical biology processes have harnessed light-induced chemistry to control biology in terms of turning on or off inhibition, and exerting remote control of localization or chemical reactivity, amongst numerous other examples not covered here. We shed some light on these processes and exemplify the full spectrum of procedures possible using such approaches.

We've learned how complex biology is, and how resourceful chemical biologist have started to peer into this complex landscape using custom-designed probes. But given the huge complexity of biology, we often have to start from ground zero, screening for a specific molecule or identifying a target of an interesting molecule. Here we will discuss methods that are ideal for these purposes in cells and in vitro.