An interaction is inferred when a bait protein is affinity captured from cell extracts by either polyclonal antibody or epitope tag and the associated interaction partner is identified by mass spectrometric methods.

Interaction directly demonstrated at the atomic level by X-ray crystallography. Also used for NMR or Electron Microscopy (EM) structures. If there is no obvious bait-hit directionality to the interaction involving 3 or more proteins, then the co-crystallized proteins should be listed as a complex.

A Protein-Fragment Complementation Assay (PCA) is a protein-protein interaction assay in which a bait protein is expressed as fusion to one of the either N- or C- terminal peptide fragments of a reporter protein and prey protein is expressed as fusion to the complementary N- or C- terminal fragment of the same reporter protein. Interaction of bait and prey proteins bring together complementary fragments, which can then fold into an active reporter, e.g. the split-ubiquitin assay.

An interaction is detected between purified proteins in vitro.

An interaction is detected between purified proteins in vitro.

An interaction is detected between purified proteins in vitro.

Bait protein expressed as a DNA binding domain (DBD) fusion and prey expressed as a transcriptional activation domain (TAD) fusion and interaction measured by reporter gene activation.