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Updated: May 20, 2026

Fluorescence Recovery after Merging a Droplet to Measure the Two-dimensional Diffusion of a Phospholipid Monolayer
Published on: October 15, 2015
Direct measurement of diffusion in olfactory cilia using a modified FRAP approach
Mihai Alevra1, Peter Schwartz, Detlev Schild
1Department of Neurophysiology and Cellular Biophysics, University of Göttingen, Göttingen, Germany. malevra@gwdg.de
Abstract:
The diffusion coefficient of fluorescein in detached cilia of Xenopus laevis olfactory receptor neurons was measured using spatially-resolved FRAP, where the dye along half of the ciliary length was photobleached and its spatiotemporal fluorescence redistribution recorded. Fitting a one-dimensional numerical simulation of diffusion and photobleaching for 35 cilia resulted in a mean value of the diffusion coefficient (1.20 ± 0.23) · 10(-10)m(2)/s and thus a reduction by a factor of 3.4 compared to free diffusion in aqueous solution.
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Fluorescent recovery after photobleaching (FRAP) is a fluorescent-protein-based detection technique used to quantify protein movement rates within the cell. This method exposes a small portion of the cell to an intense laser beam. The laser beam causes permanent photobleaching of the fluorophore-tagged proteins in the exposed region. As the bleached...

