Ternary interactions

We have recently established a novel technique, the SUS bridge assay (SUB) that allows analysing multimeric interactions (Grefen 2014; Grefen and Blatt 2012a) (see figure 8). The SUB assay is a powerful expansion of the classical SUS by simply expressing an additional protein along with the bait and prey pair. Three different types of interactions can hence be detected:

A) an interaction between a bait and prey pair that do not interact could be facilitated through coexpression of a third, bridging protein;

B) an interaction between a bait and prey pair that do interact could be inhibited through a third protein or

C) an interaction could be enhanced.

The proof-of-concept of the method has recently been published (Grefen 2014; Grefen and Blatt, 2012a; Honsbein et al., 2009), and we have established a range of Gateway™-compatible expression vectors to test inducible or repressible expression of third proteins.