For decades, structural biologists struggled with shoddy data, often finding that proteins wouldn’t show up correctly on their structures. Joel Sussman, a former head of the Protein Data Bank, recalls his first discovery of an intrinsically disordered protein in the 1990s. The mistake was laughable: “Oh, Joel, you’re not a very good biochemist,” he joked.
Proteins are typically arranged into distinct shapes: alpha-helices and beta sheets. A key principle of structural biology is that a protein’s structure determines its function. However, around the turn of the millennium, scientists began to acknowledge that not all proteins have permanent structures. Estimates suggest over half of eukaryotic proteins contain “spaghetti-like” strands, challenging traditional views on protein function and structure.
Source: https://www.statnews.com/2025/07/17/nobel-laureate-david-baker-new-advance-disordered-proteins