Peter Tompa

Peter Tompa graduated from the University of Budapest ELTE, and has been working since then at the Institute of Enzymology, Biological Research Center of the Hungarian Academy of Sciences, Budapest, Hungary. His basic disciplines are protein science and enzymology, and his research activity covered studies on interactions of soluble enzymes, cytoskeletal proteins and the calcium-activated intracellular protease, calpain. Due to having worked on two IDPs, MAP2, and calpastatin, his interest turned to studying proteins without a well-defined structure in 2000, his major activity ever since. He has played an influential role in initiating studies on IDPs, and is also playing a role in the subsequent rapid expansion of the field. He has contributed to basic discoveries in the field, such as the role of transient structural elements in the recognition function of IDPs, the possible chaperone function of IDPs, the evolution of IDPs by repeat expansion, the role of the structural malleability of IDPs in their promiscuous activity, (moonlighting), structural disorder in the bound state (fuzziness) and the role of hydration of IDPs in their functions. He studied the molecular principles of the interactions of IDPs, the problems of determining their concentrations, developed a novel algorithm for the sequence-based prediction of disorder, and a novel 2D electrophoresis technique for the rapid experimental identification of IDPs. The novel methods enabled to characterize the evolutionary advance and prevalence in eukaryotic proteomes of protein disorder, and also to fill up the first database of protein disorder, DisProt, by actual data. He has also contributed several influential reviews and book chapters. In all, he contributed about 30 papers to the field, including some basic ones towards developing the concept of disorder. He held a PhD course on protein disorder at the ELTE University, Budapest, Hungary, the Weizmann Institute of Science, Rehovot, Israel, and the East China University of Science and Technology (ECUST), Shanghai, China. He has been an invited speaker at the first international meeting of the field, the IDP subgroup meeting at the “Annual Meeting of the American Biophysical Society”, March 3-7, Baltimore, USA, he organized the IDP section at the “European Biophysical Society Annual meeting”, July 14-18, London, UK, and was the main organizer of the first conference of the field, the EMBO workshop “Intrinsically unfolded proteins: from structure to function”, May 20-24, Budapest, Hungary (www.embo-iup.enzim.hu).