Invited Speaker 23rd International Society of Magnetic Resonance Conference 2023

Investigating the evolution of intrinsically disordered proteins through the lens of NMR spectroscopy (#52)

Jie-rong HUANG 1
  1. National Yang Ming Chiao Tung University, Taipei, TAIWAN

Intrinsically disordered proteins (IDPs) or proteins containing intrinsically disordered regions (IDRs) are abundant in over half of the eukaryotic proteome. While significant efforts have been devoted to studying these proteins' structure and function relationships, the evolutionary origins and mechanisms behind the formation of their current forms and sequences remain elusive. NMR spectroscopy is the primary tool for investigating IDPs/IDRs at a residue-specific level. I will present our recent works applying this technique to study the potential evolutionary routes of IDPs/IDRs through two examples: (1) The Musashi protein family's paralogs demonstrate that the IDRs may have evolved divergent physicochemical characteristics but for the same ability, such as liquid-liquid phase separation. (2) The IDR-tagged galectin orthologs among vertebrates show the convergent evolution of using different sequence motifs in IDRS for the agglutination functions.

  1. Chiu SH, Ho WL, Sun YC, Kuo JC, and Huang JR*. "Phase separation driven by interchangeable properties in the intrinsically disordered regions of protein paralogs" (2022) Comm. Biol. 5:400
  2. Ho WL and Huang JR*. "The return of the rings: Evolutionary convergence of aromatic residues in the intrinsically disordered regions of RNA-binding proteins for liquid–liquid phase separation." (2022) Prot Sci 31:e4317
  3. Chiu YP, Sun YC, Qiu DC, Lin YH, Chen YQ, Kuo JC, and Huang JR*. "Liquid-liquid phase separation and extracellular multivalent interactions in the tale of galectin-3" (2020) Nat Comm 11:1229