Making versatile control of biological machines easily possible for everybody we engineer a system for light dependend control of protein activity per protein degradation.
Harnessing the ClpXP protease system of prokaryotes enables degradation of a peptid tag (ssrA) fused protein upon induction with the adaptor protein SspB. Using a Split version of SspB, protein degradation is activated through heterodimerisation of both SspB parts.We utilize light dependent heterodimerisation to eventually obtain light inducible degradation.
Modelling of the light dependency of protein degradation will even make simple and accurate control of protein activity for any desired level of activity possible.
As a proof of principle we investigate degradation of the fluorescent reporter protein mCherry.