RESEARCH ARTICLE Pi-Pi contacts are an overlooked protein feature relevant to phase separation Robert McCoy Vernon1, Paul Andrew Chong1, Brian Tsang1,2, Tae Hun Kim1, Alaji Bah1†, Patrick Farber1‡, Hong Lin1, Julie Deborah Forman-Kay1,2* 1Program in Molecular Medicine, Hospital for Sick Children, Toronto, Canada; 2Department of Biochemistry, University of Toronto, Toronto, Canada Abstract Protein phase separation is implicated in formation of membraneless organelles, signaling puncta and the nuclear pore. Multivalent interactions of modular binding domains and their target motifs can drive phase separation. However, forces promoting the more common phase separation of intrinsically disordered regions are less understood, with suggested roles for multivalent cation-pi, pi-pi, and charge interactions and the hydrophobic effect. Known phase- separating proteins are enriched in pi-orbital containing residues and thus we analyzed pi- interactions in folded proteins. We found that pi-pi interactions involving non-aromatic groups are widespread, underestimated by force-fields used in structure calculations and correlated with solvation and lack of regular secondary structure, properties associated with disordered regions. We present a phase separation predictive algorithm based on pi interaction frequency, highlighting proteins involved in biomaterials and RNA processing. DOI: https://doi.org/10.7554/eLife.31486.001 *For correspondence:
[email protected] Introduction † Present address: Department Protein phase separation has important implications for cellular organization and signaling of Biochemistry and Molecular (Mitrea and Kriwacki, 2016; Brangwynne et al., 2009; Su et al., 2016), RNA processing Biology, SUNY Upstate Medical University, New York, United (Sfakianos et al., 2016), biological materials (Yeo et al., 2011) and pathological aggregation States; ‡Zymeworks, Vancouver, (Taylor et al., 2016).