BENGALURU: Ever wondered what is the importance of protein cells and what they do? A team of researchers from the National Centre for Biological Sciences (NCBS) has understood this and developed a unique tool.
The deep-learning tool called Disobind predicts how intrinsically disordered proteins, the shape shifting molecules which are important for cellular communication, latch on to their binding partners.
The research paper ‘Disobind: A sequence-based, partner-dependent contact map and interface residue predictor for intrinsically disordered regions’, was published in the Cell Systems, a Cell Press journal, on January 13. The NCBS team released the report on Wednesday.
In the paper, researchers explain that Disobind analyses all the protein sequences and uses the information to explain which protein cell binds with other protein molecules. They also said Disobind does not need any structural information or sequence alignments.
Researchers said Disobind uses protein language models for sequencing and outperforms state-of-the-art interface predictors of the Intrinsically Disordered Regions (IDR). These are flexible segments within protein cells that are not stable and do not have a fixed 3D shape.
They noted that using this tool will help medical professionals and experts understand and predict IDR’s assemblies and interactions for better health assessment.
Dr Shruthi Vishwanath, who leads the Integrative Structural Biology Lab at NCBS, said the application of tool spans disease biology to drug design. With Disobind, we can begin to reveal new interaction motifs linked to disease, suggest intervention points for regulating IDR-mediated interactions across the proteome, and better position disordered segments within large molecular assemblies, she said.