Electronegativity and intrinsic disorder of preeclampsia-related proteins

Abstract

Preeclampsia, hemorrhage, and infection are the leading causes of maternal death in underdeveloped countries. Since several proteins associated with preeclampsia are known, we conducted a computational study in which evaluated the commonness and potential functionality of intrinsic disorder in these proteins and also made an attempt to characterize their origin. To this end, we used a several supervised techniques, as a Polarity Index Method (PIM), which evaluates the electronegativity of proteins from their sequence alone. Peculiarities of resulting polar profile of the group of preeclampsia-related proteins were then compared with profiles of a group of lipoproteins, antimicrobial peptides, angiogenesis-related proteins, and the intrinsically disorder proteins. Our results showed a high graphical correlation between preeclampsia proteins, lipoproteins, and the angiogenesis proteins. These results lead us to strongly assume that the preeclampsia proteins are lipoproteins. We also show that several preeclampsia-related proteins contain significant amounts of functional disorder.