New fast BiFC plasmid assay system for in vivo protein-protein interactions

In this age of massive genetic and protein information, a fast and reliable method of studying in vivo protein-protein interactions is necessary. We have developed a novel system that can overcome limitations of existing assay methods. This new method adopts two existing systems for fast analysis of diverse protein-protein interactions. For rapid, large-scale cloning, we adopted the Gateway system and developed novel destination vectors containing YFP N-terminus (YN) or YFP C-terminus (YC) to visualize protein-protein interactions in vivo using bimolecular fluorescence complementation (BiFC). Using this system, we investigated molecular interactions among the three POZ-domain regulatory proteins mAPM-1, LRF, KLHL10 that belong to a subgroup of human POZ-domain proteins, and showed that the POZ-domains of mAPM-1, LRF and KLHL10 could form both homodimers and heterodimers. This new method is a highly efficient, sensitive and specific assay method for protein-protein interaction in vivo.