Low-resolution description of the conformational space for intrinsically disordered proteins

Abstract Intrinsically disordered proteins (IDP) are at the center of numerous biological processes, and attract consequently extreme interest in structural biology. Numerous approaches have been developed for generating sets of IDP conformations verifying a given set of experimental measurements. We propose here to perform a systematic enumeration of protein conformations, carried out using the TAiBP approach based on distance geometry. This enumeration was performed on two proteins, Sic1 and pSic1, corresponding to unphosphorylated and phosphorylated states of an IDP. The relative populations of the obtained conformations were then obtained by fitting SAXS curves as well as Ramachandran probability maps, the original finite mixture approach RamaMix being developed for this second task. The similarity between profiles of local gyration radii provides to a certain extent a converged view of the Sic1 and pSic1 conformational space. Profiles and populations are thus proposed for describing IDP conformations. Different variations of the resulting gyration radius between phosphorylated and unphosphorylated states are observed, depending on the set of enumerated conformations as well as on the methods used for obtaining the populations.