Performing a hunt by interaction mating

A working protocol in Finley's Lab at Wayne state University school of medicine. (Mikhail G. Kolonin and Russell L. Finley Jr.).

Abstract

When more than one bait will be used to screen a single library, significant time and resources can be saved by performing the interactor hunt by interaction mating. In this protocol one strain is transformed with library DNA and the transformants are collected and frozen in aliquots. For each interactor hunt, an aliquot of this frozen "pretransformed library strain" is thawed and mixed with an aliquot of a bait strain transformed with the bait expression plasmid. Overnight incubation of the mixture on a YPD plate results in mating - i.e., cells of one strain fuse with cells of the other strain to form diploids. The diploids are then exposed to galactose to induce expression of the library encoded proteins, and interactors are selected in the same manner as in the standard hunt protocols. The advantage to this approach is that it requires only one high-efficiency library transformation for multiple hunts with different baits. It is also useful for bait proteins that are somewhat toxic to yeast; yeast expressing toxic baits can be difficult to transform with the library DNA.

Last update 10-Jan-2005, Rating n/a of 0 votes.