Spencer D M
Department of Microbiology and Immunology, Baylor College of Medicine, Houston, TX 77030, USA.
Trends Genet. 1996 May;12(5):181-7. doi: 10.1016/0168-9525(96)10013-5.
For many years geneticists have relied on conditional activation to study the roles of cytolytic or cytostatic proteins in lower eukaryotes or to elucidate the epistatic relationships of proteins in a signaling pathway. Regardless of their merits, conditional mutants have only been available to mammalian geneticists within the past few years. Moreover, the approaches that exist are still limited to a subset of signaling molecules and are not reliable for in vivo studies. Now, added to the biologist's toolbox is a versatile new approach based on chemically induced dimerization that should allow for the reversible regulation of proteins at the cell surface, intracellularly, in the nucleus and in vivo.
多年来，遗传学家一直依靠条件激活来研究溶细胞或细胞抑制蛋白在低等真核生物中的作用，或阐明信号通路中蛋白质的上位关系。尽管条件突变体有其优点，但直到过去几年，哺乳动物遗传学家才能够获得这类突变体。此外，现有的方法仍然局限于一部分信号分子，并且对于体内研究而言并不可靠。现在，生物学家的工具箱中又增加了一种基于化学诱导二聚化的通用新方法，该方法应该能够在细胞表面、细胞内、细胞核以及体内对蛋白质进行可逆调节。
