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Dehydrins are a group of intrinsically disordered proteins that protect plants from damage caused by drought, cold, and high salinity. Like other intrinsically disordered proteins, dehydrins can gain structure when bound to a ligand. Previous studies have shown that dehydrins are able to protect liposomes from cold damage, but the interactions that drive membrane binding and the detailed structure of the bound and unbound forms are not known. We use an ensemble-structure approach to generate models of a dehydrin known as K2 in the presence and absence of sodium dodecyl sulfate micelles, and we docked the bound structure to the micelle. The collection of residual dipolar coupling data, amide protection factors, and paramagnetic relaxation enhancement distances, in combination with chemical shifts and relaxation measurements, allows for determining plausible structures that are not otherwise visible in time-averaged structural data. The results show that in the bound structure, the conserved lysines are important for membrane binding, whereas the flanking hydrophobic residues play a lesser role. The unbound structure shows a high level of disorder and an extended structure. We propose that the structural differences between bound and unbound forms allow dehydrins to act as molecular shields in their unbound state and as membrane protectants in their bound state. Unlike α-synuclein, the significant gain of α-helicity in K2 at low concentrations of sodium dodecyl sulfate is not due to a decrease in the critical micelle concentration. The study provides structural insight into how a disordered protein can interact with a membrane surface.

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