Highly Disordered Proteins in Prostate Cancer

Prostate cancer is one of the major threats to the man's health. There are several mechanisms of the prostate cancer development characterized by the involvement of various androgen-related and androgen-unrelated factors in prostate cancer pathogenesis and in the metastatic carcinogenesis of prostate. In all these processes, proteins play various important roles, and the KEGG database has information on 88 human proteins experimentally shown to be involved in prostate cancer. It is known that many proteins associated with different human maladies are intrinsically disordered (i.e., they do not have stable secondary and/or tertiary structure in their unbound states). The goal of this review is to consider several highly disordered proteins known to be associated with the prostate cancer pathogenesis in order to better understand the roles of disordered proteins in this disease. We also hope that consideration of the pathology-related proteins from the perspective of intrinsic disorder can potentially lead to future experimental studies of these proteins to find novel pathways associated with prostate cancer.