title: Creating conditional mutations in mammals.
abstract: For many years geneticists have relied on conditional activation to study the roles of cytolytic or cytostatic proteins in lower eukaryotes or to elucidate the epistatic relationships of proteins in a signaling pathway. Regardless of their merits, conditional mutants have only been available to mammalian geneticists within the past few years. Moreover, the approaches that exist are still limited to a subset of signaling molecules and are not reliable for in vivo studies. Now, added to the biologist's toolbox is a versatile new approach based on chemically induced dimerization that should allow for the reversible regulation of proteins at the cell surface, intracellularly, in the nucleus and in vivo.
authors.affiliation: Department of Microbiology and Immunology, Baylor College of Medicine, Houston, TX 77030, USA. dspencer@bcm.tmc.edu
authors.forename: D M
authors.initials: DM
authors.lastname: Spencer
mesh_terms: D000818:Animals; D005786:Gene Expression Regulation; D008322:Mammals; D009154:Mutation; D011499:Protein Processing, Post-Translational; D015398:Signal Transduction; D014158:Transcription, Genetic