Fluorescence correlation spectroscopy reveals a cooperative unfolding of monomeric amyloid-? 42 with a low Gibbs free energy.

ABSTRACT: The amyloid-beta peptide (A?) plays a major role in the progression of Alzheimer's disease. Due to its high toxicity, the 42 amino acid long isoform A?42 has become of considerable interest. The A?42 monomer is prone to aggregation down to the nanomolar range which makes conventional structural methods such as NMR or X-ray crystallography infeasible. Conformational information, however, will be helpful to understand the different aggregation pathways reported in the literature and will allow to identify potential conditions that favour aggregation-incompetent conformations. In this study, we applied fluorescence correlation spectroscopy (FCS) to investigate the unfolding of Alexa Fluor 488 labelled monomeric A?42 using guanidine hydrochloride as a denaturant. We show that our A?42 pre-treatment and the low-nanomolar concentrations, typically used for FCS measurements, strongly favour the presence of monomers. Our results reveal that there is an unfolding/folding behaviour of monomeric A?42. The existence of a cooperative unfolding curve suggests the presence of structural elements with a Gibbs free energy of unfolding of about 2.8?kcal/mol.

SUBMITTER: Schneider M 

PROVIDER: S-EPMC5438374 | biostudies-literature | 2017 May

REPOSITORIES: biostudies-literature