Toward a consensus in protein structure nomenclature

Abstract

In a recent article, published in Intrinsically Disordered Proteins, a valuable consensus view regarding the nomenclature for disordered proteins was presented.1 In this work the authors present a thoughtful and systemic review of terms that have been used in the literature to describe proteins that sample a heterogeneous set of structures during their biological lifetime. We agree that the term "intrinsically disordered proteins" (IDPs) is an appropriate single descriptor to refer to this particular class of proteins, although it does not fully capture much of the nuanced complexities that are inherent to this class. In what follows we suggest a refinement to this nomenclature based on an analysis of the underlying ensemble that describes the thermally accessible states of a given IDP.