Oligomers of alpha-synuclein are toxic to cells and have been proposed to play a key role in the etiopathogenesis of Parkinson's disease. As certain missense mutations in the gene encoding for alpha-synuclein induce early-onset forms of the disease, it has been suggested that these variants might have an inherent tendency to produce high concentrations of oligomers during aggregation, although ...

Short complementary B-form DNA oligomers, 6 to 20 base pairs in length, are found to exhibit nematic and columnar liquid crystal phases, even though such duplexes lack the shape anisotropy required for liquid crystal ordering. Structural study shows that these phases are produced by the end-to-end adhesion and consequent stacking of the duplex oligomers into polydisperse anisotropic rod-shaped ...

The popular amyloid hypothesis states that beta-amyloid protein aggregates to form sticky deposits in the brain tissue, causing Alzheimer’s disease. Current research studies propose that oligomeric morphologies of beta-amyloid are the principal pathogenic form of the protein. Through the use of a highly-specified capture enzyme-linked immunosorbent assay, the relative quantity of beta-amyloid o...

Local delivery of amyloid beta oligomers from the tip of a nanopipette, controlled over the cell surface, has been used to deliver physiological picomolar oligomer concentrations to primary astrocytes or neurons. Calcium influx was observed when as few as 2000 oligomers were delivered to the cell surface. When the dosing of oligomers was stopped the intracellular calcium returned to basal level...

Several types of non-equilibrium phenomena have been observed in microtubule polymerization, including dynamic instability, assembly overshoot and oscillations. They can be interpreted in terms of interactions between tubulin subunits (= alpha, beta heterodimers), microtubules, and a third state, oligomers, which represent intermediates between microtubule disassembly and the regeneration of as...

Recent findings suggest that tau oligomers, which form before neurofibrillary tangles (NFTs), are the true neurotoxic tau entities in neurodegenerative tauopathies, including Alzheimer's disease (AD). Studies in animal models of tauopathy suggest that tau oligomers play a key role in eliciting behavioral and cognitive impairments. Here, we used a novel tau oligomer-specific monoclonal antibody ...

Aggregation of highly phosphorylated tau is a hallmark of Alzheimer's disease and other tauopathies. Nevertheless, animal models demonstrate that tau-mediated dysfunction/toxicity may not require large tau aggregates but instead may be caused by soluble hyper-phosphorylated tau or by small tau oligomers. Challenging this widely held view, we use multiple techniques to show that insoluble tau ol...

A hallmark of Alzheimer's disease (AD) brain is the amyloid β (Aβ) plaque, which is comprised of Aβ peptides. Multiple lines of evidence suggest that Aβ oligomers are more toxic than other peptide forms. We sought to develop a robust assay to quantify oligomers from CSF. Antibody 19.3 was compared in one-site and competitive ELISAs for oligomer binding specificity. A two-site ELISA for oligomer...

The present study was carried out to evaluate the promising potential of polymers and oligomers from proanthocyanidins of persimmon peel as antioxidants and therapeutic agents for diabetes. Both polymers and oligomers showed the scavenging effect of 2,2-diphenyl-l-picrylhydrazyl, with IC50 values of 4.35 and 2.41 microg/mL, respectively, and they also showed a protective activity against protei...