Gene

Protozoal disease

Malaria

Biology

Apicomplexa

Ubiquitin ligase

Coding region

Degron

Ubiquitin

Computational biology

Immunology

Genetics

Gene knockdown

Antibody

Toxoplasma gondii

BIO-PROTOCOL

Toxoplasma gondii is a member of the deadly phylum of protozoan parasites called Apicomplexa. As a model apicomplexan, there is a great wealth of information regarding T. gondii's 8,000+ protein coding genes including sequence variation, expression, and relative contribution to parasite fitness. However, new tools are needed to functionally investigate hundreds of putative essential protein coding genes. Accordingly, we recently implemented the auxin-inducible degron (AID) system for studying essential proteins in T. gondii. Here we provide a step-by-step protocol for examining protein function in T. gondii using the AID system in a tissue culture setting.

Conditional Knockdown of Proteins Using Auxin-inducible Degron (AID) Fusions in Toxoplasma gondii