A strategy on prion AGAAAAGA amyloid fibril molecular modelling

TL;DR

This paper presents a molecular modelling strategy to determine the 3D atomic-resolution structure of prion AGAAAAGA amyloid fibrils, aiding in understanding prion diseases and potential treatments.

Contribution

The authors introduce a novel computational approach to model the structure of insoluble amyloid fibrils lacking experimental data.

Findings

Atomic-resolution structures of prion AGAAAAGA amyloid fibrils obtained

Modeling strategy addresses insoluble, noncrystalline protein structures

Structural data supports development of prion disease treatments

Abstract

X-ray crystallography and nuclear magnetic resonance (NMR) spectroscopy are two powerful tools to determine the protein 3D structure. However, not all proteins can be successfully crystallized, particularly for membrane proteins. Although NMR spectroscopy is indeed very powerful in determining the 3D structures of membrane proteins, same as X-ray crystallography, it is still very time-consuming and expensive. Under many circumstances, due to the noncrystalline and insoluble nature of some proteins, X-ray and NMR cannot be used at all. Computational approaches, however, allow us to obtain a description of the protein 3D structure at a submicroscopic level. To the best of the authors' knowledge, there is little structural data available to date on the AGAAAAGA palindrome in the hydrophobic region (113-120) of prion proteins, which falls just within the N-terminal unstructured region (1-123) of prion proteins. Many experimental studies have shown that the AGAAAAGA region has amyloid fibril forming properties and plays an important role in prion diseases. Due to the noncrystalline and insoluble nature of the amyloid fibril, little structural data on the AGAAAAGA is available. This paper introduces a simple molecular modelling strategy to address the 3D atomic-resolution structure of prion AGAAAAGA amyloid fibrils. Atomic-resolution structures of prion AGAAAAGA amyloid fibrils got in this paper are useful for the drive to find treatments for prion diseases in the field of medicinal chemistry.