This illustration by poster artist Jay Ryan captures central points of structural and mechanistic analysis of an ancient signaling component of eukaryotic Hippo pathways. The enzyme complex is a dynamic allosterically-activated switch that recognizes specific short motifs in rapidly evolving intrinsically disordered protein regions. Motif recognition contributes robustness to regulatory links, and appears to allow disordered regions to act as reservoirs of variability where molecular docking interactions emerge and are adaptively retained. See Gógl et al.
Image Credit: Jay Ryan, The Bird Machine
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