Making Sense of Intrinsically Disordered Proteins

Proteins form the molecular scaffolding of life and are essential to catalyzing the chemical reactions that sustain living systems. These characteristics have led us to think that proteins function only when folded into the right structure. The central dogma of molecular biology states that genetic information encoded in the DNA sequence is transcribed into messenger RNA and then translated into a sequence of amino acids, which folds into a protein. The mechanisms that govern how a linear sequence of amino acids folds into the correct three-dimensional structure are still not well understood.