Repertoire of morphable proteins in an organism

All living organisms have evolved to contain a set of proteins with variable physical and chemical properties. Efforts in the field of structural biology have contributed to uncovering the shape and the variability of each component. However, quantification of the variability has been performed mostly by multiple pair-wise comparisons. A set of experimental coordinates for a given protein can be used to define the “morphness/unmorphness”. To understand the evolved repertoire in an organism, here we show the results of global analysis of more than a thousand Escherichia coli proteins, by the recently introduced method, distance scoring analysis (DSA). By collecting a new index “UnMorphness Factor” (UMF), proposed in this study and determined from DSA for each of the proteins, the lowest and the highest boundaries of the experimentally observable structural variation are comprehensibly defined. The distribution plot of UMFs obtained for E. coli represents the first view of a substantial fraction of non-redundant proteome set of an organism, demonstrating how rigid and flexible components are balanced. The present analysis extends to evaluate the growing data from single particle cryo-electron microscopy, providing valuable information on effective interpretation to structural changes of proteins and the supramolecular complexes.