Disordered proteins: microphases or associative polymers?

Abstract

We develop a surrogate model for low complexity disordered proteins, which allows us to generate sequences with quantifiable disorder. We investigate properties of these sequences, and show that the sequence dependence of the radius of gyration only arises in the vicinity of the polymer collapse transition. Microphase propensity of the sequence is shown to be a reliable predictor, outperforming state of the art methods, in the crossover region. We show that predictions of associative polymer theory arises only as a limiting case, and discuss its applicability.