BACKGROUND The investigation of structural organisation in lignocellulose materials is important to understand changes in cellulase accessibility and reactivity resulting from hydrothermal deconstruction, to allow development of strategies to maximise bioethanol process efficiencies. To achieve progress, wheat straw lignocellulose and comparative model wood cellulose were characterised followin...

Using exhaustive Monte Carlo simulations we study the kinetics and mechanism of fibril formation using lattice models as a function of temperature (T) and the number of chains (M). While these models are, at best, caricatures of peptides, we show that a number of generic features thought to govern fibril assembly are captured by the toy model. The monomer, which contains eight beads made from t...

Herein we report a method to functionalize in vitro grown insulin amyloid fibrils with various inorganic materials. The counterion of the positively charged amyloid fibril is exchanged with anions from various salts; subsequent addition of appropriate cations results in functionalization of the amyloid fibril. We demonstrate the formation of apatite and platinum complex structures ordered by th...

Aggregation of amyloidogenic proteins into insoluble amyloid fibrils is implicated in various neurodegenerative diseases. This process involves protein assembly into oligomeric intermediates and fibrils with highly polymorphic molecular structures. These structural differences may be responsible for different disease presentations. For this reason, elucidation of the structural features and ass...

The deposition of amyloid fibrils as plaques is a key feature of several neurodegenerative diseases including in particular Alzheimer's. This disease is characterized, if not provoked, by amyloid aggregates formed from Aβ peptide that deposit inside the brain or are toxic to neuronal cells. We here used scanning transmission electron microscopy (STEM) to determine the fibril network structure a...

Amyloid fibrils are the most distinct components of the plaques associated with various neurodegenerative diseases. Kinetic studies of amyloid fibril formation shed light on the microscopic mechanisms that underlie this process as well as the contributions of internal and external factors to the interplay between different mechanistic steps. Thioflavin T is a widely used noncovalent fluorescent...

The mechanism of amyloid fibril formation by proteins has been classically described by the nucleation-dependent polymerization (NDP) model, which makes certain predictions regarding the kinetics of fibrillation. All proteins whose aggregation conforms to the NDP model display a t(2) time dependence for their initial reaction profile. However, there are proteins whose aggregation reactions have...

The tumor microenvironment, including stromal myofibroblasts and associated matrix proteins, regulates cancer cell invasion and proliferation. Here, we report that neuropilin-1 (NRP-1) orchestrates communications between myofibroblasts and soluble fibronectin that promote a5b1 integrin–dependent fibronectin fibril assembly, matrix stiffness, and tumor growth. Tumor growth and fibronectin fibril...

Mechanical testing of collagenous tissues at different length scales will provide improved understanding of the mechanical behavior of structures such as skin, tendon, and bone, and also guide the development of multiscale mechanical models. Using a microelectromechanical-systems (MEMS) platform, stress-strain response curves up to failure of type I collagen fibril specimens isolated from the d...