CD-Tagging (also known as protein trapping) provides unique means to examine individual proteins in living cells with respect to abundance, location, and dynamics. A special "CD-cassette" is inserted into genomic DNA. When the insertion occurs in the proper orientation in an intron of an expressed gene, the result is the addition of a unique "guest exon" to the mRNA and the addition of a unique "guest peptide" to the encoded protein (Jarvik et al., 1996). The guest peptide permits both visualization and isolation of the tagged protein. A key feature of the process is that the entire target gene remains intact, and so normal regulation of the gene is likely.

To produce the cell lines in this database, self-inactivating retroviral vectors were used to deliver GFP-encoding guest exons to the genome of NIH 3T3 (mouse) fibroblasts (Jarvik et al., 2002).

About 20% of the tagged lines obtained using the stealth vectors expressed tagged proteins whose cellular locations have not been previously observed. Of the remaining 80%, most (>85%) show patterns of protein abundance and localization that are concordant with what is expected from the published literature. To view a list of tagged cells, genes and proteins, click here or on "Tagged Cell Index ."

This work has been supported by grants from the National Cancer Institute (CA83219), the National Science Foundation (MCB-8920118), and the Pennsylvania Department of Health.

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For comments or suggestions contact: jarvik@andrew.cmu.edu