janfassler
commented
4 years ago Yes, I'm familiar with that literature. But as for how the low complexity regions work: the low complexity region is nucleating the formation of amyloid which changes low-affinity interactions with ligand or with each other to more stable interactions with each other, which, amazingly, can be coaxed into forming surface nanodomains which almost certainly are important for adhesion! (see minireview below)
de Groot PW, Bader O, de Boer AD, Weig M, Chauhan N. Adhesins in human fungal pathogens: glue with plenty of stick. Eukaryot Cell. 2013;12(4):470‐481. doi:10.1128/EC.00364-12
hezhaobin
As I was re-reading the Lipke 2018 review, I was trying to understand why LCR is a characteristic of adhesins and what function could it serve. I came upon two papers by Kevin Verstrepen, a yeast geneticist trained with Gerry Fink at MIT, and found his work incredibly interesting. The references are below. In the first paper, he expressed eight natural variants of the FLO1 gene from S. cerevisiae and ectopically expressed each one of them in the lab strain S288C, where all five endogenous flocculins are transcriptionally silent. He found that FLO1 alleles with a longer track of repeats, when expressed, made the cells more sticky!
References Verstrepen KJ, Jansen A, Lewitter F, Fink GR. 2005. Intragenic tandem repeats generate functional variability. Nature Genetics [Internet] 37:986–990.
Verstrepen KJ, Klis FM. 2006. Flocculation, adhesion and biofilm formation in yeasts. Molecular Microbiology [Internet] 60:5–15.