Graduate School of Information Sciences, Nagoya University, Nagoya 464-8601, Japan.
J Struct Biol. 2013 Jan;181(1):29-36. doi: 10.1016/j.jsb.2012.10.017. Epub 2012 Nov 7.
Intrinsically disordered proteins (IDPs) do not adopt stable three-dimensional structures in physiological conditions, yet these proteins play crucial roles in biological phenomena. In most cases, intrinsic disorder manifests itself in segments or domains of an IDP, called intrinsically disordered regions (IDRs), but fully disordered IDPs also exist. Although IDRs can be detected as missing residues in protein structures determined by X-ray crystallography, no protocol has been developed to identify IDRs from structures obtained by Nuclear Magnetic Resonance (NMR). Here, we propose a computational method to assign IDRs based on NMR structures. We compared missing residues of X-ray structures with residue-wise deviations of NMR structures for identical proteins, and derived a threshold deviation that gives the best correlation of ordered and disordered regions of both structures. The obtained threshold of 3.2Å was applied to proteins whose structures were only determined by NMR, and the resulting IDRs were analyzed and compared to those of X-ray structures with no NMR counterpart in terms of sequence length, IDR fraction, protein function, cellular location, and amino acid composition, all of which suggest distinct characteristics. The structural knowledge of IDPs is still inadequate compared with that of structured proteins. Our method can collect and utilize IDRs from structures determined by NMR, potentially enhancing the understanding of IDPs.
无规蛋白(IDPs)在生理条件下不采用稳定的三维结构,但这些蛋白质在生物现象中起着至关重要的作用。在大多数情况下,内在无序表现为 IDP 的片段或结构域,称为无规区域(IDR),但也存在完全无序的 IDP。尽管可以通过 X 射线晶体学确定的蛋白质结构检测到 IDR,但尚未开发出从核磁共振(NMR)获得的结构中识别 IDR 的方法。在这里,我们提出了一种基于 NMR 结构分配 IDR 的计算方法。我们比较了 X 射线结构中缺失的残基与相同蛋白质 NMR 结构中残基的偏差,并得出了一个最佳的有序和无序区域相关的偏差阈值。将获得的 3.2Å 阈值应用于仅通过 NMR 确定结构的蛋白质,然后分析和比较这些蛋白质的 IDR 与没有 NMR 对应物的 X 射线结构的 IDR,从序列长度、IDR 分数、蛋白质功能、细胞位置和氨基酸组成等方面进行分析和比较,这些都表明 IDR 具有明显的特征。与结构蛋白相比,IDP 的结构知识仍然不足。我们的方法可以从 NMR 确定的结构中收集和利用 IDR,从而有可能增强对 IDP 的理解。