The cellular economy while crafting regulatory processes relies on protein intrinsic disorder: how and why precision comes at a cost in protein structure

Regulatory proteins, including those involved in signal transduction, invariably have intrinsic disorder. Enzymes, on the other hand, rely on unique structures for their pre-formed active sites to carry out catalysis. Disorder-promoting amino acids are shown to be non-essential amino acids, for which there are minimum biosynthetic costs. Therefore, disorder costs less to cells.