Amino acid recognition for automatic resonance assignment of intrinsically disordered proteins

Resonance assignment is a prerequisite for almost any NMR-based study of proteins. It can be very challenging in some cases, however, due to the nature of the protein under investigation. This is the case with intrinsically disordered proteins, for example, whose NMR spectra suffer from low chemical shifts dispersion and generally low resolution. For these systems, sequence specific assignment is highly time-consuming, so the prospect of using automatic strategies for their assignment is very attractive. In this article we present a new version of the automatic assignment program TSAR dedicated to intrinsically disordered proteins. In particular, we demonstrate how the automatic procedure can be improved by incorporating methods for amino acid recognition and information on chemical shifts in selected amino acids. The approach was tested in silico on 16 disordered proteins and experimentally on α-synuclein, with remarkably good results.