Protein manipulation using single copies of short peptide tags in cultured cells and in; Drosophila melanogaster;

Cellular development and function rely on highly dynamic molecular interactions among proteins distributed in all cell compartments. Analysis of these interactions has been one of the main topics in cellular and developmental research and has been mostly achieved by the manipulation of proteins of interest (POIs) at the genetic level. Although genetic strategies significantly contributed to our current understanding, targeting specific interactions of POIs in a time- and space-controlled manner or analyzing the role of POIs in dynamic cellular processes such as cell migration or cell division would profit from more direct approaches. The recent development of specific protein binders, which can be expressed and function intracellularly, along with advancement in synthetic biology, have contributed to the creation of a new toolbox for direct protein manipulations. Here, we selected a number of short tag epitopes for which protein binders from different scaffolds have been generated and showed that single copies of these tags allowed efficient POIs binding and manipulation in living cells. Using; Drosophila; , we also find that single short tags can be utilized for POI manipulation; in vivo; .