High-Throughput siRNA Screening Applied to the Ubiquitin-Proteasome System

The ubiquitin-proteasome system is the major pathway for intracellular protein degradation in eukaryotic cells. Due to the large number of genes dedicated to the ubiquitin-proteasome system, mapping degradation pathways for short lived proteins is a daunting task, in particular in mammalian cells that are not genetically tractable as, for instance, a yeast model system. Here, we describe a method relying on high-throughput cellular imaging of cells transfected with a targeted siRNA library to screen for components involved in degradation of a protein of interest. This method is a rapid and cost-effective tool which is also highly applicable for other studies on gene function.