An Affinity-directed Protein Missile (AdPROM) System for Targeted Destruction of Endogenous Proteins

Abstract

We recently reported an Affinity-directed PROtein Missile (AdPROM) system for the targeted proteolysis of endogenous proteins of interest (POI) (Fulcher et al., 2016 and 2017). AdPROM consists of the Von Hippel Lindau (VHL) protein, a Cullin 2 E3 ligase substrate receptor (Bosu and Kipreos, 2008), conjugated to a high affinity polypeptide binder (such as a camelid nanobody) that recognises the target protein in cells. When introduced in cells, the target protein is recruited to the CUL2 E3 ubiquitin ligase complex for ubiquitin-mediated proteasomal degradation. For target protein recruitment, we have utilised both camelid-derived VHH domain nanobodies as well as synthetic polypeptide monobodies based on the human type III fibronectin domain (Sha et al., 2013; Fridy et al., 2014; Schmidt et al., 2016). In this protocol, we describe detailed methodology involved in generating AdPROM constructs and their application in human cell lines for target protein destruction. AdPROM allows functional characterisation of the POI and its efficiency of target protein destruction overcomes many limitations of RNA-interference approaches, which necessitate long treatments and are associated with off-target effects, and CRISPR/Cas9 gene editing, which is not always feasible.