Infographic: A Prion Assay

An approach called yeast transcriptional reporting of aggregating proteins allows for high-throughput analysis and doesn’t destroy cells.

Written byRuth Williams
| 1 min read

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© GEORGE RETSECKTo detect clumping of a protein of interest, express it together with a synthetic transcriptional activator domain (grey). If the protein remains soluble, the reporter gene (green), which is under the control of a synthetic promoter that corresponds to the activator, will be expressed. If the proteins clump together, it will not.

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Meet the Author

  • ruth williams

    Ruth is a freelance journalist. Before freelancing, Ruth was a news editor for the Journal of Cell Biology in New York and an assistant editor for Nature Reviews Neuroscience in London. Prior to that, she was a bona fide pipette-wielding, test tube–shaking, lab coat–shirking research scientist. She has a PhD in genetics from King’s College London, and was a postdoc in stem cell biology at Imperial College London. Today she lives and writes in Connecticut.

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