Disorder for variety

Disordered regions in proteins are prime real estate for alternative splicing, say Pedro Romero, Keith Dunker (Indiana University-Purdue University, Indianapolis, IN), and colleagues find that d. The innate disorder allows protein variation that in turn increases functional diversity.

Both splicing and disorder are more common in multicellular eukaryotes than in lower organisms. Dunker wondered whether this trend might be more than coincidence. Structures are available for only five pairs of alternatively spliced isoforms but, in three pairs, the regions present in one splice form but absent in another are found within disordered regions.

To expand the dataset, the authors compared various databases of disorder and of splicing. Indeed, alternatively spliced regions were strongly biased toward disorder. Their flexibility probably improves the odds that an addition or...