How Can You Quickly Activate and Inactivate Proteins?

[Gnomie27]

I have been looking into different methods of regulating protein activity for a project. I think it is pretty interesting and I want to learn more about this. I want to learn about the different methods out there, if you know of any cool or helpful regulation techniques I would certainly appreciate it.

For the project I am working on, need a method that is fast acting and activates a large quantity of a protein. I figure this means it needs to be regulated towards the end of protein production so there are a large number of inactive proteins that can be quickly activated on demand. The harder part, is that the proteins also need to "completely" inactivate on demand as well.

While I am looking for something specific, I do not want to limit my education, so if you know of some other cool methods I would love to know what they are! Anything from gene expressing to altering protein structure is helpful (I know that's pretty broad, but I like to learn. You do not have to explain it in depth, but sentence summery would be nice or link to an article).

 

[Ygggdrasil]

It depends a lot on the type of protein you'd like to regulate. Adding/removing a small molecule inhibitor of an enzyme can be a relatively fast way of inactivating/reactivating your protein, though it may be difficult to get complete inactivation when using a drug. Another approach could be to use an inducible degradation system such as the one described here: http://www.nature.com/nmeth/journal/v6/n12/full/nmeth.1401.html