Intrinsically Disordered Proteins: Controlled Chaos or Random Walk

Abstract

Traditional conventions that a protein's sequence dictates its definitive, tertiary structure, and that this fixed structure provides the protein with the ability to carry out its designated role(s) are still correct but not for all proteins. Research over the past decade discovered that several key proteins possess intrinsically disordered regions (IDRs) that are crucial to their ability to perform specific functions and are observed clustered together within important classes of proteins. In this review, we aim to demonstrate how free energy landscapes, molecular dynamics simulations, and homology modeling are helpful in understanding key conformational dynamics of intrinsically disordered proteins (IDPs). Additionally, we use a list of predicted IDPs found in Arabidopsis to identify chromatin organizers and transcriptional regulators as being highly enriched in IDPs. Furthermore, we focus our attention to specific proteins within these families such as HAC5, EFS, ANAC019, ANAC013, and ANAC046. Future studies are needed to experimentally identify additional IDPs and their binding mechanisms.

Development and Yield Traits Indicate That the Constitutive Wound Response Phenotype of Prosystemin Overexpressing Tomato Plants Entails No Fitness Penalty

“…The pleiotropic effects produced by ProSys overexpression in tomato could be related to the structural features of the ProSys protein itself, which was demonstrated to be an IDP having no stable or ordered three-dimensional structure [5]. IDPs are abundant in eukaryotic proteomes and include a high percentage of signaling proteins and TFs that actively participate in cell signaling and transcriptional regulation by being able to recog-nize and bind to various partners after undergoing disorder-to-order transitions [98][99][100][101][102]. Thus, it might be hypothesized that ProSys participates, as an IDP, in the modulation of plant development signaling by integrating signals from multiple plant growth regulatory and ambient cues, similar to other plant IDP TFs involved in stress and light-regulated transcriptional activation [103,104].…”