title: Environmental Pressure May Change the Composition Protein Disorder in Prokaryotes.
abstract: Many prokaryotic organisms have adapted to incredibly extreme habitats. The genomes of such extremophiles differ from their non-extremophile relatives. For example, some proteins in thermophiles sustain high temperatures by being more compact than homologs in non-extremophiles. Conversely, some proteins have increased volumes to compensate for freezing effects in psychrophiles that survive in the cold. Here, we revealed that some differences in organisms surviving in extreme habitats correlate with a simple single feature, namely the fraction of proteins predicted to have long disordered regions. We predicted disorder with different methods for 46 completely sequenced organisms from diverse habitats and found a correlation between protein disorder and the extremity of the environment. More specifically, the overall percentage of proteins with long disordered regions tended to be more similar between organisms of similar habitats than between organisms of similar taxonomy. For example, predictions tended to detect substantially more proteins with long disordered regions in prokaryotic halophiles (survive high salt) than in their taxonomic neighbors. Another peculiar environment is that of high radiation survived, e.g. by Deinococcus radiodurans. The relatively high fraction of disorder predicted in this extremophile might provide a shield against mutations. Although our analysis fails to establish causation, the observed correlation between such a simplistic, coarse-grained, microscopic molecular feature (disorder content) and a macroscopic variable (habitat) remains stunning.
authors.affiliation: TUM, Department of Informatics, Bioinformatics & Computational Biology-i12, Boltzmannstr. 3, 85748 Garching, Munich, Germany; TUM Graduate School of Information Science in Health (GSISH), Boltzmannstr. 11, 85748 Garching, Munich, Germany.
authors.forename: Esmeralda
authors.initials: E
authors.lastname: Vicedo
authors.affiliation: Icahn School of Medicine at Mount Sinai, Department of Pharmacology and Systems Therapeutics, One Gustave L. Levy Place, Box 1603, New York, New York, 10029, United States of America.
authors.forename: Avner
authors.initials: A
authors.lastname: Schlessinger
authors.affiliation: TUM, Department of Informatics, Bioinformatics & Computational Biology-i12, Boltzmannstr. 3, 85748 Garching, Munich, Germany; Institute of Advanced Study (TUM-IAS), Lichtenbergstr. 2a, 85748 Garching, Munich, Germany; Institute for Food and Plant Sciences WZW Weihenstephan, Alte Akademie 8, Freising, Germany.
authors.forename: Burkhard
authors.initials: B
authors.lastname: Rost
mesh_terms: D017753:Ecosystem; D004777:Environment; D010802:Phylogeny; D011387:Prokaryotic Cells / Q000378:metabolism*; D011506:Proteins / Q000737:chemistry*; D011827:Radiation; D054712:Salinity
chemical_list: D011506:Proteins