With the euchromatic portion of several mammalian genomes now sequenced, emphasis has turned to ascertaining the functions of gene products. A method for targeting destruction of selected proteins in mammalian cells is described, based on the ubiquitinindependent mechanism by which ornithine decarboxylase (ODC) is degraded by the 26S proteasome in collaboration with antizyme (AZ). We show that expressing whole proteins, protein domains, or peptide ligands fused to the N terminus of ODC promotes proteasome-dependent degradation of these chimeric fusion proteins and their interacting cellular target proteins. Moreover, the degradation of the interacting (targeted) protein depends on coexpression of AZ in about half of cases, providing an inducible switch for triggering the degradation process. By using 12 pairs of interacting proteins for testing, direct comparisons with several alternative strategies for achieving targeted protein destruction based on the concept of induced ubiquitination revealed advantages of the ODC͞AZ system, which does not require posttranslational attachment of ubiquitin to target proteins. As proof of concept, the ODC͞AZ system was used to ablate expression of specific endogenous proteins (e.g., TRAF6; Rb), and was shown to create the expected lesions in cellular pathways that require these proteins. Altogether, these findings reveal a strategy for achieving targeted destruction of cellular proteins, thus providing an additional tool for revealing the cellular phenotypes of gene products.antizyme ͉ ornithine decarboxylase ͉ proteasome ͉ protein degradation F unctions are known for fewer than half the genes identified in mammalian genomes to date, indicating a need for gene functionalization technologies that can reveal the phenotypes of genes and their encoded proteins in various cellular contexts. Methods targeting gene-expression pathways at the level of mRNA, such as antisense oligonucleotides and small interfering RNA, offer exquisite specificity for gene silencing through Watson-Crick-type hybridization of synthetic or vector-derived nucleotide sequences to target mRNAs. These gene-silencing methods, however, sometimes prove ineffective, either because the targeted mRNAs encode long-lived stable proteins or because of functional redundancy among members of multigene families. These deficiencies have prompted attempts to inducibly target degradation of the protein products of genes by tapping into components of the eukaryotic ubiquitination machinery, which induces proteasome-dependent degradation of ubiquitin-modified proteins (reviewed in ref. 1). Accordingly, expression systems have been described in which whole proteins or fragments constituting functional proteininteraction domains or peptide ligands are expressed as chimeric fusion proteins together with modified versions of ubiquitin (2, 3), ubiquitin ligases (e.g., HECT-domain-containing proteins) (4), or adapter proteins that associate with ubiquitin ligase complexes (e.g., F-box proteins of Skp1͞cullin͞F-box protein complexes...