Bioart for fall: From order to disorder

The cover of the fall issue of ASBMB Today was created by American Society for Biochemistry and Molecular Biology member, Soutick Saha, a bioinformatics developer at Wolfram Alpha LLC.

“Fall is my favorite season of the year,” Saha said. “The changing color of leaves not only indicates the fragility of life but also reminds us that change can be a beautiful thing.”

The cover image features different levels of disorder in 100 human proteins with intrinsically disordered regions from the AlphaFold Protein Structure Database. Disordered regions are highlighted in lighter shades.

“The hue varies from green to yellow to red, representing the increasing levels of disorder and also how leaves change color in fall, before they fall to the ground,” Saha explained.

Each image was created using the two Wolfram ResourceFunctions, BioMoleculeIDRs and BioMoleculeIDRPlot3D, which allow for the computation and visualization of intrinsically disordered regions in protein structures. The two functions are based on this study.

IDRs are stretches of protein that don’t adopt a stable structure, even under normal physiological conditions. Instead, they remain flexible and dynamic. This flexibility plays an important role in functionality, allowing a single protein region to interact with a variety of binding partners. IDRs are also frequent targets for posttranslational modification and can play a role in dynamic processes like phase separation.

AlphaFold is an AI-based program developed by Google DeepMind that predicts the 3D structures of proteins from their amino acid sequences. The program uses deep learning, a type of AI that uses artificial neural networks to identify and extract patterns from large amounts of data.

Soutick Saha

IDRs are notoriously difficult to visualize, but AI and machine-learning–based tools like AlphaFold are now transforming our ability to visualize them. In fact, AlphaFold has predicted structures of over 200 million proteins. In recognition of this groundbreaking work, AlphaFold creators Demis Hassabis and John M. Jumper were recipients of the 2024 Nobel Prize in chemistry, alongside David Baker, for their contributions to protein structure prediction.

ASBMB members will receive the print edition of the fall issue of ASBMB Today, which focuses on how AI can be used to advance the molecular life sciences, in mid-October.