Plastic life: What polymer physics can teach us about disordered proteins

Prof. Dr. Arash Nikoubashman, Leibniz-Institut für Polymerforschung Dresden and Technical University Dresden, Germany

The discovery of intrinsically disordered proteins (IDPs) has heralded a paradigm shift in molecular biology away from the principle of ”form follows function”. These IDPs can form biomolecular condensates that fulfill numerous functions in living cells, e.g., signal transduction, stress response and controlled reactions. Due to the conceptual similarities between IDPs and classical polymers, physics-based theories and computer simulations can help to understand, predict and engineer the static and dynamic properties of naturally occurring and synthetic IDPs. In this talk, I will present selected insights we have gained from coarse-grained molecular simulations, and discuss the intricacies and limitations of the underlying models. Key findings include that IDPs inherently exhibit heterogeneous interactions that are weak and distributed along the chain contour, and that IDPs collapse at the condensate-water interface and are tangentially oriented. Further, we discovered that the phase behavior and materials properties of condensates can be deducted with great accuracy from the conformations of single IDP chains in solution.