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What's in a name?
'One of the simplest ways to classify proteins is into bins called “folded” and “unfolded”, and many of us slide into that shorthand when describing them. But it’s too simple. There are proteins that adopt a consistent three-dimensional structure that is nonetheless wrong, which are better categorized as “misfolded”, and there are proteins that have distinct regions (or sometimes the whole protein) that never adopt such a fixed structure at all, which we generally call “disordered”.'
https://www.science.org/content/blog-post/unfolding-unfolded
@cyrilpedia Interesting! refers to a review paper in JACS by Pastore and Temussi: https://pubs.acs.org/doi/full/10.1021/jacs.2c07696 "The Protein Unfolded State: One, No One and One Hundred Thousand"
Part of the 'unfolding confusion' comes (I think) from a perception that all unfolded states "look the same" in experiments. But the tool makes the difference. CD may not reveal much, but e.g. #NMR can really show the precise impact of context and conditions. @structbio @biophysics