ArticleGenome biology2011
The relationship between proteome size, structural disorder and organism complexity.
Article in Genome biology, 2011. The graph could read no effect estimate from its abstract, so it casts no vote on the map. Cited by 103 papers, 1 of them a synthesis that pooled it.
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Who cites it
103 citing papers in PubMed, 1 synthesis or guideline pooled it, 212 citations in OpenAlex.
- A meta-analysis of the genomic and transcriptomic composition of complex life.Cell cycle (Georgetown, Tex.) · 2013Pooled it
- A New Anatomy of Autophagic Clearance: On the Roles of Intrinsic Disorder in the Membrane-Less on Membrane-Encapsulated Mechanism.Membranes · 2026Review
- Integrated analysis of the redoxome and zinc proteome links ribosomal protein oxidation to zinc homeostasis.Redox biology · 2026Article
- Transcript diversity reflects deleterious RNA processing errors shaped by population size in metazoans.PLoS biology · 2026Article
- Can the Timing of the Origin of Life Be Inferred from Trends in the Growth of Organismal Complexity?Life (Basel, Switzerland) · 2026Article
- Versatile roles of disordered transcription factor effector domains in transcriptional regulation.The FEBS journal · 2025Review
- Beyond Static Tethering at Membrane Contact Sites: Structural Dynamics and Functional Implications of VAP Proteins.Molecules (Basel, Switzerland) · 2025Review
- Organismal complexity strongly correlates with the number of protein families and domains.Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences of the United States of America · 2025Article
- Molecular and Functional Convergences Associated with Complex Multicellularity in Eukarya.Molecular biology and evolution · 2025Article
- Evolution of intrinsic disorder in the structural domains of viral and cellular proteomes.Scientific reports · 2025Article
- PICNIC accurately predicts condensate-forming proteins regardless of their structural disorder across organisms.Nature communications · 2024Article
- Taxonomy-specific assessment of intrinsic disorder predictions at residue and region levels in higher eukaryotes, protists, archaea, bacteria and viruses.Computational and structural biotechnology journal · 2024Article
- Article
- The determinants of the rarity of nucleic and peptide short sequences in nature.NAR genomics and bioinformatics · 2024Article
- The protein domains of vertebrate species in which selection is more effective have greater intrinsic structural disorder.bioRxiv : the preprint server for biology · 2024Article
- Evolution of Intrinsic Disorder in Protein Loops.Life (Basel, Switzerland) · 2023Article
- Estimating transcriptome complexities across eukaryotes.BMC genomics · 2023Article
- Enrichment of intrinsically disordered residues in ohnologs facilitates abiotic stress resilience in Brassica rapa.Journal of plant research · 2023Article
- Enrichment patterns of intrinsic disorder in proteins.Biophysical reviews · 2022Review
- Intrinsically disordered proteins: Ensembles at the limits of Anfinsen's dogma.Biophysics reviews · 2022Review
43 more citing papers are in PubMed but not listed here.
Corrections and comments
PubMed lists nothing against this paper. Absence here is not a guarantee, only a check that was made.
Authors and funding
3 authors at 1 institution in 1 country.
Funding
No grant is acknowledged in the PubMed record.
Abstract
backgroundSequencing the genomes of the first few eukaryotes created the impression that gene number shows no correlation with organism complexity, often referred to as the G-value paradox. Several attempts have previously been made to resolve this paradox, citing multifunctionality of proteins, alternative splicing, microRNAs or non-coding DNA. As intrinsic protein disorder has been linked with complex responses to environmental stimuli and communication between cells, an additional possibility is that structural disorder may effectively increase the complexity of species.
resultsWe revisited the G-value paradox by analyzing many new proteomes whose complexity measured with their number of distinct cell types is known. We found that complexity and proteome size measured by the total number of amino acids correlate significantly and have a power function relationship. We systematically analyzed numerous other features in relation to complexity in several organisms and tissues and found: the fraction of protein structural disorder increases significantly between prokaryotes and eukaryotes but does not further increase over the course of evolution; the number of predicted binding sites in disordered regions in a proteome increases with complexity; the fraction of protein disorder, predicted binding sites, alternative splicing and protein-protein interactions all increase with the complexity of human tissues.
conclusionsWe conclude that complexity is a multi-parametric trait, determined by interaction potential, alternative splicing capacity, tissue-specific protein disorder and, above all, proteome size. The G-value paradox is only apparent when plants are grouped with metazoans, as they have a different relationship between complexity and proteome size.
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Read under generation 80e0d062 · epoch 390. Bibliography from PubMed, PubMed Central and OpenAlex; grants from NIH RePORTER; trial links from ClinicalTrials.gov; estimates, votes and beliefs from the OpenQuestion graph.