Transient excited states of the metamorphic protein Mad2 and their implications for function

Metamorphic proteins and how to find them

In the last two decades, our existing notion that most foldable proteins have a unique native state has been challenged by the discovery of metamorphic proteins, which reversibly interconvert between multiple, sometimes highly dissimilar, native states. As the number of known metamorphic proteins increases, several computational and experimental strategies have emerged for gaining insights about their refolding processes and identifying unknown metamorphic proteins amongst the known proteome. In this review, we describe the current advances in biophysically and functionally ascertaining the structural interconversions of metamorphic proteins and how coevolution can be harnessed to identify novel metamorphic proteins from sequence information. We also discuss the challenges and ongoing efforts in using artificial intelligence-based protein structure prediction methods to discover metamorphic proteins and predict their corresponding three-dimensional structures.