Intrinsic disorder in protein sense-antisense recognition

In addition to the well-established sense-antisense complementarity abundantly present in the nucleic acid world and serving as a basic principle of the specific double-helical structure of DNA, production of mRNA, and genetic code-based biosynthesis of proteins, sense-antisense complementarity is also present in proteins, where sense and antisense peptides were shown to interact with each other with increased probability. In nucleic acids, sense-antisense complementarity is achieved via the Watson-Crick complementarity of the base pairs or nucleotide pairing. In proteins, the complementarity between sense and antisense peptides depends on a specific hydropathic pattern, where codons for hydrophilic and hydrophobic amino acids in a sense peptide are complemented by the codons for hydrophobic and hydrophilic amino acids in its antisense counterpart. We are showing here that in addition to this pattern of the complementary hydrophobicity, sense and antisense peptides are characterized by the complementary order-disorder patterns and show complementarity in sequence distribution of their disorder-based interaction sites. We also discuss how this order-disorder complementarity can be related to protein evolution.