Fig. 1: Mining Cr³⁺-associated targets through fluorescent labelling.

a Structure of Cr³⁺-NTA-AC. b Representative confocal microscopic imaging of live HepG2 cells under high glucose stress (40 mM) labelled with 50 μM Cr³⁺-NTA-AC and MitoTracker red (n = 5), demonstrating that most of the blue signals localized in mitochondria. Scale bar: 10 μm. c Selected Cr³⁺-associated proteins in HepG2 cells identified in 2-DE by fluorescence imaging and silver staining. Full 2-DE images are shown in Supplementary Fig. 2. d The protein-protein interaction (PPI) network of identified Cr³⁺-associated proteins in HepG2 cells generated via STRING²⁶. The PPI network of Cr³⁺-associated proteins was exported from the STRING database (www.string-db.org). e Representative SDS-PAGE of ATP5B with Coomassie Blue staining and fluorescence image. n = 3; mean ± SEM. Two-sided Student’s t test. f Representative SDS-PAGE of ATP5L with Coomassie Blue staining and fluorescence image. n = 3; mean ± SEM. Two-sided Student’s t test. g Cellular thermal-shift assays (CETSA) demonstrating the binding of Cr³⁺ to, ATP5L, ATP5B and Hsp60 in cellulo. n = 3; mean ± SEM. One representative result of three independent experiments is shown (b, c). Source data are provided as a Source Data file.