Intrinsically disordered regions in autophagy proteins.

ABSTRACT: Autophagy is an essential eukaryotic pathway required for cellular homeostasis. Numerous key autophagy effectors and regulators have been identified, but the mechanism by which they carry out their function in autophagy is not fully understood. Our rigorous bioinformatic analysis shows that the majority of key human autophagy proteins include intrinsically disordered regions (IDRs), which are sequences lacking stable secondary and tertiary structure; suggesting that IDRs play an important, yet hitherto uninvestigated, role in autophagy. Available crystal structures corroborate the absence of structure in some of these predicted IDRs. Regions of orthologs equivalent to the IDRs predicted in the human autophagy proteins are poorly conserved, indicating that these regions may have diverse fun

SUBMITTER: Mei Y 

PROVIDER: S-EPMC3949125 | biostudies-literature | 2014 Apr

REPOSITORIES: biostudies-literature