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Archaic Chaos: Intrinsically Disordered Proteins In Archaea, Bin Xue, Robert W. Williams, Christopher J. Oldfield, A. Keith Dunker, Vladimir N. Uversky

Molecular Medicine Faculty Publications

Background: Many proteins or their regions known as intrinsically disordered proteins (IDPs) and intrinsically disordered regions (IDRs) lack unique 3D structure in their native states under physiological conditions yet fulfill key biological functions. Earlier bioinformatics studies showed that IDPs and IDRs are highly abundant in different proteomes and carry out mostly regulatory functions related to molecular recognition and signal transduction. Archaea belong to an intriguing domain of life whose members, being microbes, are characterized by a unique mosaic-like combination of bacterial and eukaryotic properties and include inhabitants of some of the most extreme environments on the planet. With the expansion …