Prediction of intrinsically disordered regions in proteins using signal processing methods: application to heat-shock proteins

Heat-shock protein (HSP)-based immunotherapy is believed to be a promising area of development for cancer treatment as such therapy is characterized by a unique approach to every tumour. It was shown that by inhibition of HSPs it is possible to induce apoptotic cell death in cancer cells. Interestingly, there are a great number of disordered regions in proteins associated with cancer, cardiovascular and neurodegenerative diseases, signalling, and diabetes. HSPs and some specific enzymes were shown to have these disordered regions in their primary structures. The experimental studies of HSPs confirmed that their intrinsically disordered (ID) regions are of functional importance. These ID regions play crucial roles in regulating the specificity of interactions between dimer complexes and their interacting partners. Because HSPs are overexpressed in cancer, predicting the locations of ID regions and binding sites in these proteins will be important for developing novel cancer therapeutics. In our previous studies, signal processing methods have been successfully used for protein structure–function analysis (i.e. for determining functionally important amino acids and the locations of protein active sites). In this paper, we present and discuss a novel approach for predicting the locations of ID regions in the selected cancer-related HSPs.