Skip to main page content
U.S. flag

An official website of the United States government

Dot gov

The .gov means it’s official.
Federal government websites often end in .gov or .mil. Before sharing sensitive information, make sure you’re on a federal government site.

Https

The site is secure.
The https:// ensures that you are connecting to the official website and that any information you provide is encrypted and transmitted securely.

Access keys NCBI Homepage MyNCBI Homepage Main Content Main Navigation
Review
. 2021 Jun 11;433(12):166724.
doi: 10.1016/j.jmb.2020.11.023. Epub 2020 Nov 26.

Towards Decoding the Sequence-Based Grammar Governing the Functions of Intrinsically Disordered Protein Regions

Shasha Chong  1 , Mustafa Mir  2
Affiliations
Review

Towards Decoding the Sequence-Based Grammar Governing the Functions of Intrinsically Disordered Protein Regions

Shasha Chong et al. J Mol Biol. .

Abstract

A substantial portion of the proteome consists of intrinsically disordered regions (IDRs) that do not fold into well-defined 3D structures yet perform numerous biological functions and are associated with a broad range of diseases. It has been a long-standing enigma how different IDRs successfully execute their specific functions. Further putting a spotlight on IDRs are recent discoveries of functionally relevant biomolecular assemblies, which in some cases form through liquid-liquid phase separation. At the molecular level, the formation of biomolecular assemblies is largely driven by weak, multivalent, but selective IDR-IDR interactions. Emerging experimental and computational studies suggest that the primary amino acid sequences of IDRs encode a variety of their interaction behaviors. In this review, we focus on findings and insights that connect sequence-derived features of IDRs to their conformations, propensities to form biomolecular assemblies, selectivity of interaction partners, functions in the context of physiology and disease, and regulation of function. We also discuss directions of future research to facilitate establishing a comprehensive sequence-function paradigm that will eventually allow prediction of selective interactions and specificity of function mediated by IDRs.

Keywords: biomolecular assemblies; function; interactions; intrinsically disordered regions; sequence.

PubMed Disclaimer

Conflict of interest statement

Conflict of Interest The authors declare that they have no known competing financial interests or personal relationships that could have appeared to influence the work reported in this paper.

Similar articles

See all similar articles

Cited by

See all "Cited by" articles

MeSH terms

Substances

LinkOut - more resources