Ultimate paths of least resistance: Intrinsically disordered links as developmental resets in regulatory protein networks
Badyaev, A. V.; Sanchez Moreno, C.; Lee, C. A.; Britton, S. E.; Johnstone, L. M.; Duckworth, R. A.
Show abstract
Development and evolution require both stability and adaptability, yet how these opposite properties are reconciled is unclear. Here, we show that intrinsically disordered proteins (IDPs) act as reset mechanisms in conserved regulatory networks facilitating developmental transitions by integrating physical processes with genetic regulation. By tracing the ontogeny of mesenchymal cells in avian beak primordia, we demonstrate that mechanosensitive IDPs mediate shifts between physical cell states via dosage-dependent binding plasticity, converting stochastic protein variation into discreet regulatory networks. The disorder-enabled connectivity in these proteins resets their regulatory specialization and promotes population divergence. Comparative analyses across avian proteomes confirm that binding plasticity in transcriptional IDPs drives their diverse regulatory associations and accelerates their evolution. By resetting specialized states in conserved regulatory networks, IDPs flexibly regulate developmental pathways and reconcile precision with evolvability.
Matching journals
The top 3 journals account for 50% of the predicted probability mass.
Similar papers in this journal
Similar papers in this journal
- Social reprogramming in ants induces longevity-associated glia remodeling 96%
- Afadin mediates cadherin-catenin complex clustering on F-actin linked to cooperative binding and filament curvature 96%
- Evolutionary origin and structural ligand mimicry by the inserted domain of alpha-integrin proteins 96%
"Similar papers" are the closest papers from that journal in the model's embedding space. They show what the match is built on, but the ranking comes mostly from a classifier over the whole training set, not from these examples alone.