What is the mechanism of the auxin-inducible degron system?
Fusion of inducible degradation signals, so-called degrons, to cellular proteins is an elegant method of controlling protein levels in vivo.  The auxin-inducible degron (AID) system allows the rapid and reversible proteolysis of proteins of interest, and enables the generation of conditional mutants of budding yeast. Strategies that use ubiquitin-mediated protein degradation to eliminate the product of a gene of interest, such as heat-inducible degron (td) and auxin-inducible degron (AID), are powerful methods for constructing conditional mutants. Auxin-inducible degron (AID) technology allows rapid depletion of proteins in animal cells and fungi, but its application to human cells has been limited by the difficulties of tagging endogenous proteins. The auxin-inducible degron harbors great potential for dynamic protein depletion in yeast. Here, we thoroughly and quantitatively characterize the auxin-inducible degron in single yeast cells.