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THE SIGNIFICANCE AND IMPACTS OF PROTEIN DISORDER AND CONFORMATIONAL VARIANTS
INTRODUCTION
Protein disorder is a topic worth attention from the structural bioinformatics community largely for the technical challenges it presents to the field, but also for its biological and functional implications. The success of structural genomic efforts using X-ray crystallography depends on overcoming several potential bottlenecks (Chapter 40), one of which is the formation of protein crystals that can be obstructed by the presence of highly flexible and disordered regions. Despite precluding the number of structures that can be obtained, thus impacting the coverage of protein space, our current generalized understanding of disordered regions is a result of structural bioinformatics efforts that were able to extract and analyze patterns associated with these regions. These disorder predictors have been proven to be useful in advancing our understanding of disordered regions with potential impact to improve the success rate of structural genomics efforts, particularly those focused on eukaryotic proteins (Oldfield et al., 2005b).
The importance of resolving differences observed in conformational variants within protein families and understanding their impacts is also a rising issue. Most structural genomics efforts aim to solve a representative structure for each protein family to maximize the coverage of protein space with particular focus on identifying new ...
