Emergence of Palindromes in Proteins

Source: Sheari et al. (2008). A tale of two symmetrical tails: Structural and functional characteristics of palindromes in proteins. BMC Bioinformatics 9:274.

This is a paper from my dear friend Amir. He has kindly written a summary of his work for me which I have pasted below.

Well, this is a short paper, but it was really difficult to do all those analyses. In this paper, we showed that palindromic sequences in proteins are prevalent because they coincide with low-complexity regions. In addition, we showed that they have a high tendency to form alpha-helices. This is already an important result, because it is generally believed that the existence of low-complexity regions coincides with lack of stable secondary structures (=formation of intrinsically disordered proteins). This paper clearly shows that palindromes in proteins are exceptions to this rule.