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Retro-Morfs: Identifying Protein Binding Sites By Normal And Reverse Alignment And Intrinsic Disorder Prediction, Bin Xue, A. Keith Dunker, Vladimir N. Uversky

Molecular Medicine Faculty Publications

Many cell functions in all living organisms rely on protein-based molecular recognition involving disorder-to-order transitions upon binding by molecular recognition features (MoRFs). A well accepted computational tool for identifying likely protein-protein interactions is sequence alignment. In this paper, we propose the combination of sequence alignment and disorder prediction as a tool to improve the confidence of identifying MoRF-based protein-protein interactions. The method of reverse sequence alignment is also rationalized here as a novel approach for finding additional interaction regions, leading to the concept of a retro-MoRF, which has the reversed sequence of an identified MoRF. The set of retro-MoRF binding …