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A Functional Study Of Plant Protein Villin4 And The Application Of Sortase Mediated Ligation In Intrinsically Disordered Protein Substrates, Jake Heins

WWU Graduate School Collection

Villin proteins are a family of filamentous actin (F-actin) regulators, playing vital roles in the organization of cytoskeletons in eukaryotes. Villin4, found in A. thaliana has a distinct structure that contains a folded C-terminal headpiece, a 192-residue disordered “linker”, and a folded N-terminal core domain. Villin4 has been shown to bind and bundle F-actin in the C-terminal headpiece domain. This disordered linker, or intrinsically disordered region (IDR), lacks the defined three-dimensional structure often found in proteins. IDRs are not novel. In fact, over 30% of eukaryotic proteins contain a sizable intrinsically disordered region over 50 amino acids in length. These …