Flexible peptides and cytoplasmic gels.docVIP

Opinion Flexible peptides and cytoplasmic gels Dennis Bray Address: Department of Anatomy, University of Cambridge, Cambridge CB2 3DY, UK. E-mail: db10009@cam.ac.uk Published: 28 February 2005 Genome Biology 2005, 6:106 The electronic version of this article is the complete one and can be found online at /2005/6/3/106 ? 2005 BioMed Central Ltd Abstract Recent progress in predicting protein structures has revealed a surprising abundance of proteins that are significantly unfolded under physiological conditions. Unstructured, flexible polypeptides are likely to be functionally important and may cause local cytoplasmic regions to become gel-like. In his 2001 book ‘Cells, Gels and the Engines of Life’ [1], Gerald Pollack gives a highly entertaining and accessible account of cell biology from the standpoint of polymer chem- istry. The cytoplasm is indubitably gel-like, he says, so we must expect it to have similar properties to other non-living gels: cells should swell and shrink depending on ionic condi- tions and undergo dramatic phase changes associated with sol-to-gel transitions. In the broad sweep of published litera- ture on living cells there is indeed abundant support for this thesis, and Pollack is not the first to advance such views. But probably no one else has made the argument so forcefully, or taken it so far. Too far, perhaps, for when Pollack challenges the role of the phospholipid bilayer as a permeability barrier, or offers new and dramatically simplified explanations for such well-understood phenomena as action potentials, muscle contraction and mitosis, he leaves most professional biologists behind [2]. This is unfortunate, since there is much we do not know about the physical conditions existing in the cytoplasm, and here Pollack says much that is relevant - one should not throw out the baby with the bath water. involved in nuclear transport [3,4]. But many more are now know