In Greek mythology, Proteus, son of Poseidon and prophetic shepherd of sea-beasts, could foretell the future. The elusive sea god was difficult to capture as he assumed many forms—a lion, a serpent, ...

Intrinsically disordered proteins (IDPs) make up about 30 percent of our proteome. They are important to many fundamental aspects of biology and disrupted in disease. Since they lack a stable shape, ...

Textbooks often depict proteins in one conformation, but real life, as usual, is much messier. While some proteins have stable, unchanging structures, many others have intrinsically disordered regions ...

(1) The lock-and-key model of protein interactions has dominated biology for more than a century, shaping how scientists study molecular communication and approach the development of novel ...

A protein engineered by University of Washington scientists wraps around its target. (Institute for Protein Design Image) The wiggly targets known to scientists as “intrinsically disordered proteins” ...

Drug developers have historically glued their attention to targeting the precise and fine-tuned protein structures underlying biological function. Yet this approach misses over 50% of the human ...

Misfolded proteins can appear as small aggregates, soluble monomers, or large insoluble inclusion bodies. While the fundamental biophysical mechanisms that cause cytotoxicity are not fully understood, ...

Researchers at Harvard and Northwestern have developed a machine learning method that can design intrinsically disordered proteins with custom properties, addressing nearly 30% of all human proteins ...

The wiggly targets known to scientists as “intrinsically disordered proteins” have for decades eluded capture by custom-made drugs and antibodies. But they played such important biological roles — ...