Abstract
An understanding of the forces shaping protein conservation is key, both for the fundamental knowledge it represents and to allow for optimal use of evolutionary information in practical applications. Sequence conservation is typically examined at one of two levels. The first is a residue-level, where intra-protein differences are analyzed and the second is a protein-level, where inter-protein differences are studied. At a residue level, we know that solvent-accessibility is a prime determinant of conservation. By inverting this logic, we inferred that disordered regions are slightly more solvent-accessible on average than the most exposed surface residues in domains. By integrating abundance information with evolutionary data within and across proteins, we confirmed a previously reported strong surface-core association in the evolution of structured regions, but we found a comparatively weak association between disordered and structured regions. The facts that disordered and structured regions experience different structural constraints and evolve independently provide a unique setup to examine an outstanding question: why is a protein's abundance the main determinant of its sequence conservation? Indeed, any structural or biophysical property linked to the abundance-conservation relationship should increase the relative conservation of regions concerned with that property (e.g., disordered residues with mis-interactions, domain residues with misfolding). Surprisingly, however, we found the conservation of disordered and structured regions to increase in equal proportion with abundance. This observation implies that either abundance-related constraints are structure-independent, or multiple constraints apply to different regions and perfectly balance each other.