Computational methods are prevailing in identifying protein intrinsic disorder. The results from predictors are often given as per-residue disorder scores. The scores describe the disorder propensity of amino acids of a protein and can be further represented as a disorder curve. Many proteins share similar patterns in their disorder curves. The similar patterns are often associated with similar functions and evolutionary origins. Therefore, finding and characterizing specific patterns of disorder curves provides a unique and attractive perspective of studying the function of intrinsically disordered proteins. In this study, we developed a new computational tool named IDalign using dynamic programming. This tool is able to identify similar patterns among disorder curves, as well as to present the distribution of intrinsic disorder in query proteins. The disorder-based information generated by IDalign is significantly different from the information retrieved from classical sequence alignments. This tool can also be used to infer functions of disordered regions and disordered proteins. The web server of IDalign is available at (http://labs.cas.usf.edu/bioinfo/service.html).
Keywords: disorder pattern; dynamic programming; dynamic time warping; intrinsic disorder; structural flexibility.