Affiliation:
1. Department of Integrative Structural and Computational Biology Scripps Research 10550 North Torrey Pines Road La Jolla CA 92037
Abstract
AbstractIt is hard to evaluate the role of individual mentors in the genesis of important ideas. In the case of our realization that proteins do not have to be stably folded to be functional, the influence of Richard Lerner and our collaborative work in the 1980s on the conformations of immunogenic peptides provided a base level of thinking about the nature of polypeptides in water solutions that led us to formulate and develop our ideas on the importance of intrinsic disorder in proteins. This review describes how the insights gained into the behavior of peptides led directly to the realization that proteins were not only capable of being functional while disordered, but also that disorder provided a distinct functional advantage in many important cellular processes.
Funder
National Institute of General Medical Sciences
National Cancer Institute