Physico-chemical methods for studing beta-amyloid aggregation

Manipulating the amyloid-beta aggregation pathway with chemical chaperones.

Amyloid-beta (Abeta) assembly into fibrillar structures is a defining characteristic of Alzheimer's disease that is initiated by a conformational transition from random coil to beta-sheet and a nucleation-dependent aggregation process. We have investigated the role of organic osmolytes as chemical chaperones in the amyloid pathway using glycerol to mimic the effects of naturally occurring molec...

A simplified exactly solvable model for beta-amyloid aggregation

We propose an exactly solvable simplified statistical mechanical model for the thermodynamics of β-amyloid aggregation, generalizing a well–studied model for protein folding. The monomer concentration is explicitly taken into account as well as a non trivial dependence on the microscopic degrees of freedom of the single peptide chain, both in the α-helix folded isolated state and in the fibrill...

Optical trapping for the characterization of amyloid-beta aggregation kinetics.

Alzheimer's disease (AD) is marked by the accumulation of neuronal plaques from insoluble amyloid-beta (Aβ) peptides. Growing evidence for the role of Aβ oligomers in neuronal cell cytotoxicity and pathogenesis has prompted the development of novel techniques to better understand the early stages of aggregation. Near infrared (NIR) optical trapping was applied to characterize the early stages o...

Physico-chemical characterization of beta-amyloid oligomers and study of their function in biological processes at molecular level

Statistical Methods in Physico-chemical Characterization of Newly Synthesized Compounds

Evaluation of the physico-chemical properties that affected the experimental data was performed for 45 newly synthesized compounds, derivatives of 2,4-dioksotetrahydro-1,3-thiazole. In order to quantify molecular structure various molecular descriptors were calculated for each of the 45 compounds. Evaluation of physico-chemical properties was done by the partial least-squares (PLS) regression. ...