Interactions between intrinsically disordered proteins
IDPs are proteins that lack significant secondary or tertiary structure and are highly prevalent in biology. These proteins play important roles in cellular regulation, signaling, and liquid-liquid phase separation. We are specifically interested in fundamentally understanding the way IDPs interact with one another and other molecules in the cell. We will develop a theory for IDP interactions as a function of its length, binding sites, and charge distribution, and test it using all-atom molecular dynamics simulations.