Is the unfoldome widespread in proteomes?

TL;DR

This study estimates the prevalence of intrinsically disordered proteins across different domains of life, suggesting that the widespread presence of the unfoldome may be overestimated and that structured proteins are more common than previously thought.

Contribution

It provides a new estimation method for the frequency of disordered proteins in proteomes, challenging prior higher estimates and supporting the structure-function paradigm.

Findings

Lower frequency of disordered proteins than previous reports

Segments of non-observed residues longer than 30 amino acids are rare

Supports the idea that the unfoldome is less widespread than often assumed

Abstract

The term unfoldome has been recently used to indicate the universe of intrinsically disordered proteins. These proteins are characterized by an ensemble of high-flexible interchangeable conformations and therefore they can interact with many targets without requiring pre-existing stereo-chemical complementarity. It has been suggested that intrinsically disordered proteins are frequent in proteomes and disorder is widespread also in structured proteins. However, several studies raise some doubt about these views. It this paper we estimate the frequency of intrinsically disordered proteins in several living organisms by using the ratio S between the likelihood, for a protein sequence, of being composed mainly by order-promoting or disorder-promoting residues. We scan several proteomes from Archaea, Bacteria and Eukarya. We find the following figures: 1.63% for Archaea, 3.91% for Bacteria, 16.35% for Eukarya. The frequencies we found can be considered an upper bound to the real frequency of intrinsically disordered proteins in proteomes. Our estimates are lower than those previously reported in several studies. A scanning of proteins in the Protein Data Bank (PDB) searching for segments of non-observed residues reveals that segments of non-observed residues longer than 30 amino acids, are rare. Our observations support the idea that the spread of the unfoldome has been often overestimated. If we exclude some exceptions, the structure-function paradigm is generally valid and pre-existing stereo-chemical complementarity among structures remains an important requisite for interactions between biological macromolecules.