An open access paper at PLOS Computational Biology addresses the importance of intrinsically disordered regions (IDRs) in Drosophila melanogaster.
Li Zhao of Rockefeller University is a leading investigator on the origin and function of orphan and taxonomically restricted genes (TRGs) and proteins. In this recent paper, she and Junhui Peng provide evidence, using AlphaFold2 Multimer, that intrinsically disordered regions (which are frequently also coded by TRGs) provide key sites for protein-protein interactions (PPIs). They write:
Our results also underscore the pivotal role of intrinsically disordered regions in mediating PPIs at a genomic scale. Our findings reveal that over 98% of predicted high confidence PPIs involve at least some level of intrinsic disorder, from short IDRs (5–30 residues, 3307/3621) to long IDRs (over 30 residues, 2719/3621). This highlights IDRs as important players in cellular interactomes, potentially enabling dynamic and context-dependent binding.
The paper is here: “A predicted structural interactome reveals binding interference from intrinsically disordered regions.”