Designability, aggregation propensity and duplication of disease-associated proteins

Over 2000 proteins in the Ensembl human genome database have been linked with disease information from OMIM. In comparison with all human proteins, we find that disease-associated proteins tend to have less designable folds in terms of their SCOP family counts, suggesting that they are intrinsically less robust to mutation and environmental stress. Disease proteins also tend to have isoelectric points closer to neutrality and more alternating hydrophilic-hydrophobic amino acid stretches compared with the average human protein. These results suggest that protein aggregation is a significant phenomenon associated with diseases. Another finding in this work is that many disease proteins are highly sequence similar to other disease proteins, suggesting that gene duplication has contributed to the expansion of disease-prone protein families.