There is only a certain amount of stress biological structures can withstand before they fall apart. Tissue fluids freeze into ice crystals when exposed to temperatures below −3 °C, for instance, and enzymes break down and become dysfunctional at extremely low temperatures. But there are organisms that are built to thrive in such harsh conditions. Some species of fungi, for instance, can survive the harsh weather in Antarctica, and scientists have spent years trying to figure out how. A study published in Science Advances on September 7 suggests that these polar organisms may have adapted due to tweaks to unstructured regions of their proteins.
The intrinsically disordered regions (IDRs) of proteins are the formless, liquidlike parts of proteins that lack the ability to fold into a functional shape and often react with RNA to form naked, or membraneless, cell organelles such as the nucleolus through a phenomenon known as liquid-liquid ...
