Wow. Iva’s paper is finally published. There is only one human proteome, and there are many disordered protein regions in there. For the first time systematic predictions of their biological functions are now available. Of course, this is only the *first* attempt to systematically map the function of the human disordered regions, so in some ways it’s just “baby steps”. But as Michael Elowitz said: “When a baby takes a step, it’s a big deal!” Biologists studying disordered regions of our proteins can get an idea of what other disordered regions are similar (nearby in the map). They can get a hypothesis of biological function for their region.
For our group, this milestone is a long time coming. We first realized that something like this was possible around 10 years ago, when Taraneh made the first maps of this kind for yeast. A lot changed during this project: a pandemic came and went, Iva moved to Europe, globular protein folding and design were to some extent solved, protein language models, etc. Iva first submitted this paper to [journals-that-must-not-be-named] more than two years ago. We are very grateful to Susan Marqusee and the reviewers at PNAS for not giving up on us.