Nonspecific binding limits the number of proteins in a cell and shapes their interaction networks.

ABSTRACT: Multicellular organisms, from Caenorhabditis elegans to humans, have roughly the same number of protein encoding genes. We show that the need to prevent disease-causing nonspecific interactions between proteins provides a simple physical reason why organism complexity is not reflected in the number of distinct proteins. By collective evolution of the amino acid sequences of protein binding interfaces we estimate the degree of misbinding as a function of the number of distinct proteins. Protein interaction energies are calculated with an empirical, residue-specific energy function tuned for protein binding. We show that the achievable energy gap favoring specific over nonspecific binding decreases with protein number in a power-law fashion. From the fraction of proteins involved in nonspeci

SUBMITTER: Johnson ME 

PROVIDER: S-EPMC3021073 | biostudies-literature | 2011 Jan

REPOSITORIES: biostudies-literature