Functional Roles of Ductile Protein Regions (IDRs) in Eukaryotic Proteomes

Abstract

Ductile/intrinsically disordered proteins (IDPs) and regions (IDRs) are essential for basic cellular functions, and complement the function of rigid proteins in all organisms. They played a significant role in the evolution of multicellularity and cell type specification. In particular, an unbiased and phylogenetically broad analysis shows evidence for a positive and strong correlation between the fraction of IDRs in transcription factors (TFs) participating in cell cycle, cell size, cell division, cell differentiation, or cell proliferation, and other important developmental processes and organismic complexity, measured by cell-type number.