Journal
PROCEEDINGS OF THE NATIONAL ACADEMY OF SCIENCES OF THE UNITED STATES OF AMERICA
Volume 115, Issue 40, Pages 9929-9934Publisher
NATL ACAD SCIENCES
DOI: 10.1073/pnas.1804177115
Keywords
membraneless organelles; liquid-liquid phase separation; intrinsically disordered proteins
Categories
Funding
- US Department of Energy, Office of Science, Basic Energy Sciences [DE-SC0013979]
- National Institutes of Health [NIGMS R01GM118530]
- Department of Energy Office of Science User Facility [DE-AC02-05CH11231]
- National Science Foundation [TG-MCB120014]
- NIH High-Performance Computing Biowulf cluster
- Arizona State University
- National Institute of Diabetes and Digestive and Kidney Diseases of the NIH
- Office of Naval Research via the US Naval Research Laboratory Base Program
- U.S. Department of Energy (DOE) [DE-SC0013979] Funding Source: U.S. Department of Energy (DOE)
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Proteins that undergo liquid-liquid phase separation (LLPS) have been shown to play a critical role in many physiological functions through formation of condensed liquid-like assemblies that function as membraneless organelles within biological systems. To understand how different proteins may contribute differently to these assemblies and their functions, it is important to understand the molecular driving forces of phase separation and characterize their phase boundaries and material properties. Experimental studies have shown that intrinsically disordered regions of these proteins are a major driving force, as many of them undergo LLPS in isolation. Previous work on polymer solution phase behavior suggests a potential correspondence between intramolecular and intermolecular interactions that can be leveraged to discover relationships between single-molecule properties and phase boundaries. Here, we take advantage of a recently developed coarse-grained framework to calculate the theta temperature T-theta, the Boyle temperature T-B, and the critical temperature T-c for 20 diverse protein sequences, and we show that these three properties are highly correlated. We also highlight that these correlations are not specific to our model or simulation methodology by comparing between different pairwise potentials and with data from other work. We, therefore, suggest that smaller simulations or experiments to determine T-theta or T-B can provide useful insights into the corresponding phase behavior.
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