Statistical Mechanics and Kinetics of Amyloid Fibrillation

TL;DR

This review discusses the physical principles, mathematical modeling, and experimental analysis of amyloid fibrillation, a process linked to neurodegenerative diseases, covering equilibrium, kinetics, and molecular mechanisms.

Contribution

It provides a comprehensive overview of physical models, kinetic analysis, and experimental linkage for amyloid fibrillation, integrating molecular mechanisms and mathematical foundations.

Findings

Systematic analysis of equilibrium and kinetic aspects

Incorporation of molecular mechanisms into models

Guidance on global fitting of experimental data

Abstract

Amyloid fibrillation is a protein self-assembly phenomenon that is intimately related to well-known human neurodegenerative diseases. During the past few decades, striking advances have been achieved in our understanding of the physical origin of this phenomenon and they constitute the contents of this review. Starting from a minimal model of amyloid fibrils, we explore systematically the equilibrium and kinetic aspects of amyloid fibrillation in both dilute and semi-dilute limits. We then incorporate further molecular mechanisms into the analyses. We also discuss the mathematical foundation of kinetic modeling based on chemical mass-action equations, the quantitative linkage with experimental measurements, as well as the procedure to perform global fitting.