Visualizing biochemical activities in living cells through chemistry

The development of molecular probes to visualize cellular processes is an important challenge in chemical biology. One possibility to create such cellular indicators is based on the selective labeling of proteins with synthetic probes in living cells. Over the last years, our laboratory has developed different labeling approaches for monitoring protein activity and for localizing synthetic probes inside living cells. In this article, we review two of these labeling approaches, the SNAP-tag and CLIP-tag technologies, and their use for studying cellular processes.