Towards the in vivo identification of protein-protein interactions

Protein-protein interactions (PPIs) play crucial roles in biological processes. The conventional methods based on affinity purification of a protein of interest (POI) have been widely used to identify unknown PPIs. Recently, proximity-dependent biotin identification (BioID) has been used increasingly to investigate PPIs. BioID utilizes the proximity-dependent biotinylation, in the presence of biotin, of endogenous proteins that are located within a certain distance of POI-fused biotin ligase, which enables us to reveal the more physiologically relevant PPIs in vivo compared to the conventional methods. However, there is little information on an appropriate way to administer biotin in vivo. Recent studies reported some biotin supplementations for in vivo BioID. In this commentary, we review the BioID technique as a tool to examine PPIs, and we introduce a potential method to achieve efficient proximity labelling for in vivo BioID.