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The yeast two-hybrid assay: still finding connections after 25 years

Nature Methods volume 11, pages 1203–1206 (2014)Cite this article

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The idea of using hybrid proteins containing transcription factor domains to analyze protein-protein interactions was described in 1989. Over the past 25 years, this method has begun to reveal the complex protein networks that underlie cellular behavior.

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Figure 1: A human reference interactome by 2020? (a) The invention of the yeast two-hybrid assay sparked the idea that protein-protein interaction networks should and could be mapped, as shown here for Saccharomyces cerevisiae and Caenorhabditis elegans.

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Author information

Authors and Affiliations

  1. Marc Vidal is at the Center for Cancer Systems Biology (CCSB) and Department of Cancer Biology, and Department of Genetics, Dana-Farber Cancer Institute, Harvard Medical School, Boston, Massachusetts, USA.,

    Marc Vidal

  2. Stanley Fields is at the Howard Hughes Medical Institute and Departments of Genome Sciences and Medicine, University of Washington, Seattle, Washington, USA.,

    Stanley Fields

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  1. Marc Vidal
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  2. Stanley Fields
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Correspondence to Marc Vidal or Stanley Fields.

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The authors declare no competing financial interests.

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Vidal, M., Fields, S. The yeast two-hybrid assay: still finding connections after 25 years. Nat Methods 11, 1203–1206 (2014). https://doi.org/10.1038/nmeth.3182

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