English

A thermodynamic metric quantitatively predicts disordered protein partitioning and multicomponent phase behavior

Soft Condensed Matter 2026-03-10 v1 Materials Science Statistical Mechanics Biomolecules

Abstract

Intrinsically disordered regions (IDRs) of proteins mediate sequence-specific interactions underlying diverse cellular processes, including the formation of biomolecular condensates. Although IDRs strongly influence condensate compositions, quantitative frameworks that predict and explain their phase behavior in complex mixtures remain lacking. Here we introduce a thermodynamic model that quantitatively predicts the behavior of arbitrary combinations of IDRs across a wide range of concentrations, with accuracy comparable to state-of-the-art simulations. The model learns low-dimensional, context-independent representations of IDR sequences that combine to form mixture representations, producing context-dependent interactions. These representations define a thermodynamic metric space in which distances between IDRs correspond directly to differences in their thermodynamic properties. We show that the model predicts multicomponent phase diagrams in quantitative agreement with molecular simulations without being trained on free-energy or phase-coexistence data. The metric space provides geometrically intuitive predictions of IDR partitioning, multicomponent condensation, and context-dependent mutational effects, addressing several central problems in IDR biophysics within a single model. Systematic interrogation of the learned representations reveals how amino-acid composition and sequence patterning jointly determine mixture thermodynamics. Together, our results establish a unified and interpretable framework for predicting and understanding the behavior of complex mixtures of IDRs and other sequence-dependent biomolecules.

Keywords

Cite

@article{arxiv.2603.08300,
  title  = {A thermodynamic metric quantitatively predicts disordered protein partitioning and multicomponent phase behavior},
  author = {Zhuang Liu and Beijia Yuan and Mihir Rao and Gautam Reddy and William M. Jacobs},
  journal= {arXiv preprint arXiv:2603.08300},
  year   = {2026}
}

Comments

Includes Supplementary Information

R2 v1 2026-07-01T11:10:13.100Z