BACKGROUND A wide class of human diseases and neurodegenerative disorders, such as Alzheimer's disease, is due to the failure of a specific peptide or protein to keep its native functional conformational state and to undergo a conformational change into a misfolded state, triggering the formation of fibrillar cross-β sheet amyloid aggregates. During the fibrillization, several coexisting specie...

The aggregation and deposition of amyloid-β((1-42) )(Aβ(42)) in the brain is implicated in the aetiology of Alzheimer's disease (AD). While the mechanism underlying its deposition in vivo is unknown its precipitation in vitro is influenced by metal ions. For example, Aβ(42) is known to bind copper, Cu(II), in vitro and binding results in aggregation of the peptide. The biophysical properties of...

Amyloid formation is an ordered aggregation process, where β-sheet rich polymers are assembled from unstructured or partially folded monomers. We examined how two Escherichia coli cytosolic chaperones, DnaK and Hsp33, and a more recently characterized periplasmic chaperone, Spy, modulate the aggregation of a functional amyloid protein, CsgA. We found that DnaK, the Hsp70 homologue in E. coli, a...