Improved monomeric red, orange and yellow fluorescent proteins derived from Discosoma sp. red fluorescent protein
Key findings
Engineered mCherry, mOrange, tdTomato, and related variants from DsRed through iterative mutagenesis. mCherry is monomeric, photostable, and fast-maturing with emission at 610 nm. tdTomato is a tandem dimer with the highest brightness of the series. These became the standard red-spectrum reporters for mammalian imaging.