Last January, I inaugurated this column with a look at three technology developments from 2005 that could soon be in kits. None are commercialized yet, but here are three more that should join them soon.
Let's start with a drug-inducible system for protein stabilization.
Key to Wandless' system is a mutant FKBP12 protein that is degraded as soon as it's made, unless it is bound to a small-molecule ligand called Shield-1. "This new technique essentially allows investigators to use small molecules to regulate the expression levels of any protein of interest," Wandless writes in an E-mail. "We target proteins directly (not precursor DNA or RNA), so the method is considerably faster than transcriptional...