Intrinsically disordered proteins and liquid-liquid phase separation in SARS-CoV-2 interactomes

This paper discusses the properties of proteins and their relations in the interactomes of the selected subsets of SARS-CoV-2 proteome-the membrane protein, nonstructural proteins, and, finally, full proteome. Protein disorder according to several measures, liquid-liquid phase separation probabilities, and protein node degrees in the interaction networks were singled out as the features of interest. Additionally, viral interactomes were combined with the interactome of human lung tissue so as to examine if the new connections in the resulting viral-host interactome are linked to protein disorder. Correlation analysis shows that there is no clear relationship between raw features of interest, whereas there is a positive correlation between the protein disorder and its neighborhood mean disorder. There are also indications that highly connected viral hubs tend to be on average more ordered than proteins with a small number of connections. This is in contrast to previous similar studies conducted on eukaryotic interactomes and possibly raises new questions in research on viral interactomes.