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The role of ordered cooperative assembly in biomolecular condensates

Nature Reviews Molecular Cell Biology volume 22, pages 647–648 (2021)Cite this article

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Biomolecular condensates, regardless of whether they exhibit liquid-like properties, are in many cases not fully amorphous, but instead exhibit partial degrees of local structure and order. Here, we discuss how ordered interactions may underlie the cooperative assembly and cellular function of a wide variety of partially ordered macromolecular assemblies.

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Acknowledgements

We thank W. I. Weis for his insightful comments on the text, and A. J. Spakowitz and V. T. Vachharajani for insightful discussions. We sincerely apologize to the many authors who we could not cite to due space limitations. This work was supported by 1R35GM130332 and a Howard Hughes Medical Institute Faculty Fellow Award (A.R.D.), a Stanford Bio-X Fellowship (E.K.), grants K124670 and K131702 from the Hungarian Scientific Research Fund (OTKA) and a Spearhead grant (SRP51) from the Vrije Universiteit Brussel (P.T.).

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Authors and Affiliations

  1. Graduate Program in Biophysics, Stanford University, Stanford, CA, USA

    Elgin Korkmazhan & Alexander R. Dunn

  2. Department of Chemical Engineering, Stanford University, Stanford, CA, USA

    Elgin Korkmazhan & Alexander R. Dunn

  3. VIB-VUB Center for Structural Biology, Brussels, Belgium

    Peter Tompa

  4. Structural Biology Brussels, Vrije Universiteit Brussel, Brussels, Belgium

    Peter Tompa

  5. Institute of Enzymology, Research Centre for Natural Sciences, Budapest, Hungary

    Peter Tompa

  6. Cardiovascular Institute, Stanford School of Medicine, Stanford, CA, USA

    Alexander R. Dunn

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  1. Elgin Korkmazhan
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  2. Peter Tompa
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Correspondence to Alexander R. Dunn.

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Korkmazhan, E., Tompa, P. & Dunn, A.R. The role of ordered cooperative assembly in biomolecular condensates. Nat Rev Mol Cell Biol 22, 647–648 (2021). https://doi.org/10.1038/s41580-021-00408-z

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