Protein disorder controls allostery in DNA

Metabolism, gene expression, and signaling all require the adaptation of protein activity to the mixture of reactants and products in a cell. This trait to adapt, called allostery, is hardwired in the structure of proteins. Binding a ligand at one location in a protein can change distant locations, thus tuning protein activity. How allostery works has been subject of intense research since its discovery sixty years ago. The challenge is to understand the order of events that follow ligand-binding in the three-dimensional architecture of proteins. Here we simplify this task by studying allostery in DNA, a nearly one-dimensional system. DNA can transmit allosteric signals over many nanometers to generate cooperativity in the binding of transcription factors, an archetype of the long-range action of allostery. We found that binding of the transcription factor ComK amplifies intrinsic microsecond structural fluctuations in DNA many nanometers distant from the binding site. Yet, it is not protein binding per se, but the intrinsically disordered region (IDR) of the protein that amplifies these fluctuations. IDR removal does not only rigidify DNA, but it also abolishes allostery. The result is a structurally distorted protein-DNA complex that lost its function. These findings have important implications for our understanding of transcription activation and suggest a new functional role for IDRs in transcription factors.