On the intrinsic disorder status of the major players in programmed cell death pathways

Alexey V Uversky; Bin Xue; Zhenling Peng; Lukasz Kurgan; Vladimir N Uversky

doi:10.12688/f1000research.2-190.v1

On the intrinsic disorder status of the major players in programmed cell death pathways

F1000Res. 2013 Sep 17:2:190. doi: 10.12688/f1000research.2-190.v1. eCollection 2013.

Authors

Alexey V Uversky¹, Bin Xue², Zhenling Peng³, Lukasz Kurgan³, Vladimir N Uversky⁴

Affiliations

¹ Center for Data Analytics and Biomedical Informatics, Department of Computer and Information Sciences, College of Science and Technology, Temple University, Philadelphia, PA, 19122, USA.
² Department of Molecular Medicine, College of Medicine, University of South Florida, Tampa, FL, 33612, USA.
³ Department of Electrical and Computer Engineering, University of Alberta, Edmonton, Canada.
⁴ Department of Molecular Medicine, College of Medicine, University of South Florida, Tampa, FL, 33612, USA ; Byrd Alzheimer's Research Institute, College of Medicine, University of South Florida, Tampa, FL, 33612, USA ; Institute for Biological Instrumentation, Russian Academy of Sciences, 142290 Pushchino, Russian Federation.

Abstract

Earlier computational and bioinformatics analysis of several large protein datasets across 28 species showed that proteins involved in regulation and execution of programmed cell death (PCD) possess substantial amounts of intrinsic disorder. Based on the comprehensive analysis of these datasets by a wide array of modern bioinformatics tools it was concluded that disordered regions of PCD-related proteins are involved in a multitude of biological functions and interactions with various partners, possess numerous posttranslational modification sites, and have specific evolutionary patterns (Peng et al. 2013). This study extends our previous work by providing information on the intrinsic disorder status of some of the major players of the three major PCD pathways: apoptosis, autophagy, and necroptosis. We also present a detailed description of the disorder status and interactomes of selected proteins that are involved in the p53-mediated apoptotic signaling pathways.

Grants and funding

This work was supported in part by University of South Florida (V.N.U. and B.X.), Temple University (A.V.U.), the Programs of the Russian Academy of Sciences for the “Molecular and Cellular Biology” (to V.N.U.), the Alberta Innovates Graduate Scholarship in Omics (to Z.P.), and the Natural Sciences and Engineering Research Council (NSERC) Discovery grant (to L.K.).