Evolutionary Study of Disorder in Protein Sequences

Intrinsically disordered proteins (IDPs) contain regions lacking intrinsic globular structure (intrinsically disordered regions, IDRs). IDPs are present across the tree of life, with great variability of IDR type and frequency even between closely related taxa. To investigate the function of IDRs, we evaluated and compared the distribution of disorder content in 10,695 reference proteomes, confirming its high variability and finding certain correlation along the Euteleostomi (bony vertebrates) lineage to number of cell types. We used the comparison of orthologs to study the function of disorder related to increase in cell types, observing that multiple interacting subunits of protein complexes might gain IDRs in evolution, thus stressing the function of IDRs in modulating protein-protein interactions, particularly in the cell nucleus. Interestingly, the conservation of local compositional biases of IDPs follows residue-type specific patterns, with E- and K-rich regions being evolutionarily stable and Q- and A-rich regions being more dynamic. We provide a framework for targeted evolutionary studies of the emergence of IDRs. We believe that, given the large variability of IDR distributions in different species, studies using this evolutionary perspective are required.