Studying Nuclear Receptor Complexes in the Cellular Environment

The ligand-regulated structure and biochemistry of nuclear receptor complexes are commonly determined by in vitro studies of isolated receptors, cofactors, and their fragments. However, in the living cell, the complexes that form are governed not just by the relative affinities of isolated cofactors for the receptor but also by the cell-specific sequestration or concentration of subsets of competing or cooperating cofactors, receptors, and other effectors into distinct subcellular domains and/or their temporary diversion into other cellular activities. Most methods developed to understand nuclear receptor function in the cellular environment involve the direct tagging of the nuclear receptor or its cofactors with fluorescent proteins (FPs) and the tracking of those FP-tagged factors by fluorescence microscopy. One of those approaches, Förster resonance energy transfer (FRET) microscopy, quantifies the transfer of energy from a higher energy "donor" FP to a lower energy "acceptor" FP attached to a single protein or to interacting proteins. The amount of FRET is influenced by the ligand-induced changes in the proximities and orientations of the FPs within the tagged nuclear receptor complexes, which is an indicator of the structure of the complexes, and by the kinetics of the interaction between FP-tagged factors. Here, we provide a guide for parsing information about the structure and biochemistry of nuclear receptor complexes from FRET measurements in living cells.