Gene birth contributes to structural disorder encoded by overlapping genes

S. Willis; J. Masel

Overlapping genes tend to encode proteins with higher intrinsic structural disorder (ISD) than those encoded by non-overlapping genes [36] . The term disorder applies broadly to proteins which, at least in the absence of a binding partner, lack a stable secondary and tertiary structure. There are different degrees of disorder: molten globules, partially unstructured proteins and random coils with regions of disorder spanning from short (less than 30 residues in length) to long. Disorder can be shown experimentally or predicted from amino acid sequences using software [15] . [36] estimated, using the latter approach, that 48% of amino acids in overlapping regions exhibit disorder, compared to only 23% in non-overlapping regions.