Kinetic traps and life

“It is well known that the thermodynamically stable state of proteins in a crowded environment is insoluble fibrils” [ Proc. Natl. Acad. Sci. vol. 119 pp. e2122078119 ’22 ].  However even under ideal conditions the time scale for their formation is hours to days [ Nat. Rev. Mol. Cell Biol. 15, 384–396 (2014) ].  Hopefully it’s even longer (decades) for senile plaques (abeta) neurofibrils (tau) and Lewy bodies (alpha-synuclein) to form.  The fact that equilibrium takes such a long time to reach, allows rapid synthesis and degradation of proteins to avoid their aggregation.  So we live because our proteins are trapped in a less the equilibrium (metastable) state by kinetics — e.g. a kinetic trap.

We now understand what amyloid actually is

Lately we have received an embarrassment of riches about amyloid and the diseases it causes.  I’ll start with the latest — the structure of TDP amyloid.

I must say it is a pleasure to get back to chemistry and away from the pandemic, however briefly.  So relax and prepare to enjoy some great chemistry and protein structure.

TDP43 (you don’t to know what the acronym stands for) is a protein which binds to RNA (among other things).  It also forms aggregates, and some 50 mutations are known producing FrontoTemporal  Dementia (FTD) and/or Amyotrophic Lateral Dementia (ALS).  I saw a case as a resident (before things were worked out) and knew something was screwy because while ALS is a horrible disease, patients are clear to the end (witness Stephen Hawking) and my patient was clearly dementing.

Mutations in TDP43 occur in 5% of familial ALS.  More to the point cytoplasmic aggregates of TDP43 occur in 95% of sporadic cases of ALS (no mutations), so neurologists have been fascinated with TDP43 for years.

Back before we knew much about the structure of amyloid, it was characterized by the dyes that would bind to it (Congo Red, thioflavin etc.) and birefringence (see below).  None of this is true for the aggregates of TDP43.

Well we now know what the structure of amyloid is.  You simply can’t do better than  Cell vol. 184 pp. 4857 – 4873 ’21 — but it might be behind a paywall.

So here’s the skinny about what amyloid actually is —

 

It is a significantly long polypeptide chain  flattening  out into a 4.8 Angstrom thick sheet, essentially living in 2 dimensions.  Thousands of sheets then pile on top of each other forming amyloid.  So amyloid is not a particular protein, but a type of conformation a protein can assume (like the alpha helices, beta pleated sheets etc. etc. ).

The structure also explained why planar molecules like Congo Red bind to amyloid (it slips between the sheets).   Or at least that’s what I thought.

 

Enter Nature vol. 601 pp. 29 – 30, 139 – 143 ’22 showing that some 79 amino acids of the 414 amino acids of TDP43 flatten out into single sheet in the aggregates, with the sheets piling on top of each other.  If that isn’t amyloid, what is?

 

Where are the beta strands producing birefringence if this is amyloid.  In fact where is the birefringence? (see below). The paper says that there are 10 beta strands in the 79 amino acids, but they are short with only two of them containing more than 3 amino acids (I guess they can see beta strands by measuring backbone angles a la Ramachandran plots).  The high number of glycine mediated turns prevents beta sheets from stacking next to each other precluding the crossBeta  structure (and birefringence).

 

Why doesn’t Congo Red bind?  My idea about how it binds to other amyloids (slipping between the sheets) clearly is incorrect.

 

There are all sorts of fascinating points about the amyloid of TDP43.  The filaments derived from patients are stable to heating to 65 C.   The structure of the TDP43 fibrils derived from patients with FTD/ALS are quite different in structure from synthetic filaments made from parts of TDP43, so possibly a lot of work will have to be done again.

 

Here is some more detail on amyloid structure:

 

So start with NH – CO – CHR.  NH  CO and C in the structure all lie in the same plane (the H and the side chain of the amino acid < R >  project out of the plane).

Here’s a bit of elaboration for those of you whose organic chemistry is a distant memory.  The carbon in the carbonyl bond (CO) has 3 bonding orbitals in one plane 120 degrees apart, with the 4th orbital perpendicular to the plane — this is called sp2 hybridization.  The nitrogen can also be hybridized to sp2.  This lets the pair of electrons above the plane roam around moving toward the carbon.  Why is this good?  Because any time you let electrons roam around you increase their entropy (S) and anything increasing entropy lowers their free energy (F)which is given by the formula F = H – TS where H is enthalpy (a measure of bond strength, and T is the absolute temperature in Kelvin.

 

So N and CO are in one plane, and so are the bonds from  N and C to the adacent atoms (C in both cases).

 

You can fit the plane atoms into a  rectangle 4.8 Angstroms high.  Well that’s one 2 dimensional rectangle, but the peptide bond between NH and CO in adjacent rectangles allows you to tack NH – CO – C s together while keeping them in a 3 dimensional parallelopiped 4.8 Angstroms high

 

Notice that in the rectangle the NH and CO bonds are projecting toward the top and bottom of the rectangle, which means that in each plane  NH – CO – CHR s, the NH and CO are pointing out of the 2 dimensional plane (and in opposite directions to boot). This is unlike protein structure in which the backbone NHs and COs hydrogen bond to each other.  There is nothing in this structure for them to bond to

 

What they do is hydrogen bond to another 3 dimensional parallelopiped (call it a sheet, but keep in mind that this is NOT the beta sheet you know about from the 3 dimensional structures of proteins we’ve had for years).

So thousands of sheets stacked together form the amyloid fibril.

 

Where does the 9 Angstrom reflection of cross beta (and birefringence) come from?  Consider the  [ NH – CHR – CO ]  backbone as it lies in the 4.8  thick plane (Having studied proteins structure since entering med school in ’62, I never thought such a thing would even be possible ! ).  It curves around like a snake lying flat.  Where are the side chains?  They are in the 4.8 thick plane, separating parts of the meandering backbone from each other — by an average of 9 Angstroms.

Here is an excellent picture of the Alzheimer culprit — the aBeta42 peptide as it forms the amyloid of the senile plaque

https://pubmed.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/27355699/#&gid=article-figures&pid=figure-7-uid-6.

You can see the meandering backbone and the side chains keeping the backbone apart.

Then Nature [ vol. 598,  pp. 359 – 363 ’21] blows the field wide open, finding 19 different conformations of tau in clinically distinct diseases. Each clinical disease appears to be associated with a distinct polymorphism.  This is also true for the polymorphisms of alpha-synuclein, with distinct conformations being seen in each of Parkinsonism, multiple system atrophy and Lewy body dementia.

In none of the above diseases is there a mutation (change in amino acid sequence) in the protein.

Henry J. Heinz claimed to have 57 varieties of pickles in 1896, but Cell [ vol. 184 pp. 4857 – 4873 ’21  ] Page 4862 claims that 24 amyloid polymorphs of alpha-synuclein have been found and structurally characterized.  Recall that alpha-synuclein amyloid is the principal component of the Lewy body of Parkinsonism  and Lewy Body disese

How did they get the 24 different conformations?  They incubated the protein under different conditions (e.g. different salt concentrations, different alpha-synuclein concentrations, different salts).

Why is this incredibly good news? 

Because it moves us past amyloid itself, to the conditions which cause amyloid to form.  Certainly, removing amyloid or attacking it hasn’t resulted in any clinical benefit for the Alzheimer patient despite billions being spent by Big Pharma to do so.

We will start to study the ‘root causes’ of amyloid formation.   The amino acid sequence of each protein is identical despite the different conformations of the chain in the amyloid. Clearly the causes must be different for each of the different polymorphs of the protein.  This just has to be true.

Amyloid Structure At Last ! 4 Polymorphs

Henry J. Heinz claimed to have 57 varieties of pickles in 1896, but Cell [ vol. 184 pp. 4857 – 4873 ’21  ] Page 4862 claims that 24 amyloid polymorphs of alpha-synuclein have been found and structurally characterized.

What does this actually mean in English? The previous 3 articles in this series have discussed the structure of amyloid — the most relevant being https://luysii.wordpress.com/2021/10/11/amyloid-structure-at-last/

Basically, in amyloid some of the protein backbone flattens out so it lies in a single plane, and thousands of the planes stack on top of each other producing the amyloid fiber.  In the case of alpha-synuclein some 56 of the 144 amino acids comprising the protein flatten out.   Just as throwing a chain with 56 links on the floor will give different conformations of the chain,  the conformation of alpha-synuclein is different in each of the polymorphs.

So what?

Well, different polymorphs of another protein, the tau protein which forms the neurofibrillary tangle in Alzheimer’s give rise to at least 25 clinically distinct neurological diseases called tauopathies (3 more are chronic traumatic encephalopathy, corticobasal degeneration, and Pick’s disease).  In each of the these four diseases, a different conformation of tau is seen.

Then Nature [ vol. 598,  pp. 359 – 363 ’21] blows the field wide open, finding 19 different conformations of tau in clinically distinct diseases. Each clinical disease appears to be associated with a distinct polymorphism.  This is also true for the polymorphisms of alpha-synuclein, with distinct conformations being seen in each of Parkinsonism, multiple system atrophy and Lewy body dementia.

In none of the above diseases is there a mutation (change in amino acid sequence) in the protein

Back to alpha-synuclein.  How did they get the 24 different conformations?  They incubated the protein under different conditions (e.g. different salt concentrations, different alpha-synuclein concentrations, different salts).

Why is this incredibly good news? 

Because it moves us past amyloid itself, to the conditions which cause amyloid to form.  Certainly, removing amyloid or attacking it hasn’t resulted in any clinical benefit for the Alzheimer patient despite billions being spent by Big Pharma to do so.

We will start to study the ‘root causes’ of amyloid formation.   The amino acid sequence of each protein is identical despite the different conformations of the chain in the amyloid. Clearly the causes must be different for each of the different polymorphs of the protein.  This just has to be true.

Some cynic said that people who talk about the root causes of crime never get their hands dirty.  Hopefully neuroscience is about to take off its gloves.

This is why alternative approaches to Alzheimer’s disease, such as Cassava Biosciences manipulation of filamin A, might bear fruit.   For details please see — https://luysii.wordpress.com/2021/03/25/the-science-behind-cassava-sciences-sava/

Just got this back from one of the authors of the Nature paper

“Yes, studying the conditions that lead to all these different structures
is certainly high on our to-do list now.”

 

A possible new way to attack Parkinson’s disease

Alpha-synuclein is the main component of the Lewy body of Parkinson’s disease.  It contains 140 amino acids, and is ‘natively unfolded’ in that it has no apparent ordered secondary structure (alpha helices, beta pleated sheets) detectable by a variety of methods — far ultraviolet circular dichroism, Fourier transform infrared spectroscopy or NMR spectroscopy. When the protein binds to artificial membranes half of it forms alpha helices.   Amazingly, after a huge amount of work we don’t know what alpha-Synuclein actually does.  Knockouts have only minor CNS abnormalities.

However, alpha synuclein forms fibrils which bind to cell surface receptors with internalization and transmission to other cells, just like prions.   Two such receptors for alpha-synuclein fibrils are Lymphocyte Activation Gene E (LAG3) and Amyloid PrecursorLike Protein 1 (ALPL1).

LAG3 has 4 immunoglobulin like domains (D1 – D4).  It uses D1 to capture the carboxy terminus which is exposed and concentrated on the surface of the alpha-synuclein fibrils.

Interestingly the monomers are said to adopt a self-shielded conformation which impedes the exposure of the carboxy terminus.  Phosphorylation of serine #129 enhances the binding of alpha-synuclein preformed fibrils to LAG3 and APLP1.  So the carboxy terminus of alpha-synuclein is a promising traget to block Parkinson’s disease progression.

To understand anything in the cell you need to understand nearly everything in the cell

Understanding how variants in one protein can either increase or decrease the risk of Parkinson’s disease requires understanding of the following: the lysosome, TMEM175, Protein kinase B, protein moonlighting, ion channel lysoK_GF, dopamine neurons among other things. So get ready for a deep dive into molecular and cellular biology.

It is now 50 years and 6 months since L-DOPA was released in the USA for Parkinson’s disease, and I was tasked as a resident by the chief with running the first L-DOPA clinic at the University of Colorado.  We are still learning about the disease as the following paper Nature vol. 591 pp. 431 – 437 ’21 will show. 

The paper describes an potassium conducting ion channel in the lysosomal membrane called LysoK_GF.  The channel is made from two proteins TMEM175 and protein kinase B (also known as AKT).

TMEM175 is an ion channel conducting potassium.  It is unlike any of the 80 or so known potassium channels.  It  contains two repeats of 6 transmembrane helices (rather than 4) and no pore loop containing the GYG potassium channel signature sequence. Lysosomes lacking it aren’t as acidic as they should be (enzymes inside the lysosome work best at acid pH).  Why loss of a potassium channel show affect lysosomal pH is a mystery (to me at least).

Genome Wide Association Studies (GWAS) have pointed to the genomic region containing TMEM175 as having risk factors for Parkinsonism.  Some variants in TMEM175 are associated with increased risk of the disease and others are associated with decreased risk — something fascinating as knowledge here should certainly tell us something about Parkinsonism.  

The other protein making up LysoK_GF is protein kinase B (also known as AKT). It is found inside the cell, sometimes associated with membranes, sometimes free in the cytoplasm. It is big containing 481 amino acids. Control of its activity is important, and Cell vol. 169 pp. 381 – 405 ’17 lists 21 separate amino acids which can be modified by such things as acetylation, phosphorylation, sumoylation, Nacetyl glucosamine, proline hydroxylation.  Well 2^21 is 2,097,152, so this should keep cell biologists busy for some time. Not only that some 100 different proteins AKT phosphorylates were known as 2017.  

TMEM175 is opened by conformational changes in AKT.  Normally the enzyme is inactive because the pleckstrin homology domain binds to the catalytic domain inhibiting enzyme activity as the substrate can’t get in.

Remarkably you can make a catalytically dead AKT, and it still works as a controller of TMEM175 activity — this is an example of a moonlighting molecule — for more please see — https://luysii.wordpress.com/2021/01/11/moonlighting-molecules/.

Normally the activity and conformation of AKT is controlled by the metabolic state of the cell (with 21 different molecular knob sites on the protein this shouldn’t be hard).  So the fact that AKT conformation controls TMEM175 conductivity which controls lysosome activity gives the metabolic state of the cell a way to control lysosomal function.  

Notice how to understand anything in the cell you must ask ‘what’s it for’, thinking that is inherently teleological. 

Now on to the two risk factors for Parkinsonism in TMEM175.  The methionine –> threonine mutation at amino acid #393 reduces the lysoK_GF current and is associated with an increased risk of parkinsonism, while the glutamine –> proline mutation at amino acid position #65 gives a channel which remains functional under conditions of nutrient starvation. 

The authors cultured dopamine neurons and found out that the full blooded channel LysoK_GF (TMEM175 + AKT) protected neurons against a variety of insults (MPTP — a known dopamine neuron toxin, hydrogen peroxide, nutrient starvation). 

TMEM175 knockout neurons accumulate more alpha-synuclein — the main constituent of the Lewy body of Parkinsonism.

So it’s all one glorious tangle, but it isn’t just molecular biological navel gazing, because it is getting close to one cause (and hopefully a treatment) of Parkinson’s disease.  

How flat can a 100 amino acid protein be?

Alpha-synuclein is of interest to the neurologist because several mutations cause Parkinson’s disease or Lewy Body dementia.  The protein accumulates in the Lewy Bodies of these diseases.  These are concentric hyaline inclusions over 15 microns in diameter found in pigmented brain stem nuclei (substantia nigra, locus coeruleus).

The protein contains 140 amino acids.  It is ‘natively unfolded’ meaning that it has no ordered secondary structure (alpha helix, beta sheet).  No one is sure what it does.  Mouse knockouts are normal, so the mutations must produce something new.

Alpha-synuclein can form amyloid fibrils, which are basically stacks of pancakes made of flattened segments of proteins one on top of the other.

Would you believe that the 100 amino terminal amino acids of alpha-synuclein can form an absolutely flat structure.  Well it does and there are pictures to prove it in PNAS vol. 117 pp. 20305 – 20315 ’20.  Here’s a link if you or your institution has a subscription — https://www.pnas.org/content/pnas/117/33/20305.full.pdf.

This isn’t the usual alpha-synuclein, as it was chemically synthesized with phosphorylated tyrosine at amino acid #39.  Who would have ever predicted that 100 amino acids could form a structure like this?  I wouldn’t. The structure was determined by cryoEM and all the work was done in China.  Very state of the art world class work.  Bravo.

Amyloid

Amyloid goes way back, and scientific writing about has had various zigs and zags starting with Virchow (1821 – 1902) who named it because he thought it was made out of sugar.  For a long time it was defined by the way it looks under the microscope being birefringent when stained with Congo red (which came out 100 years ago,  long before we knew much about protein structure (Pauling didn’t propose the alpha helix until 1951).

Birefringence itself is interesting.  Light moves at different speeds as it moves through materials — which is why your legs look funny when you stand in shallow water.  This is called the refractive index.   Birefringent materials have two different refractive indexes depending on the orientation (polarization) of the light looking at it.  So when amyloid present in fixed tissue on a slide, you see beautiful colors — for pictures and much more please see — https://onlinelibrary.wiley.com/doi/full/10.1111/iep.12330

So there has been a lot of confusion about what amyloid is and isn’t and even the exemplary Derek Lowe got it wrong in a recent post of his

“It needs to be noted that tau is not amyloid, and the TauRx’s drug has failed in the clinic in an Alzheimer’s trial.”

But Tau fibrils are amyloid, and prions are amyloid and the Lewy body is made of amyloid too, if you subscribe to the current definition of amyloid as something that shows a cross-beta pattern on Xray diffraction — https://www.researchgate.net/figure/Schematic-representation-of-the-cross-b-X-ray-diffraction-pattern-typically-produced-by_fig3_293484229.

Take about 500 dishes and stack them on top of each other and that’s the rough dimension of an amyloid fibril.  Each dish is made of a beta sheet.  Xray diffraction was used to characterize amyloid because no one could dissolve it, and study it by Xray crystallography.

Now that we have cryoEM, we’re learning much more.  I have , gone on and on about how miraculous it is that proteins have one or a few shapes — https://luysii.wordpress.com/2010/08/04/why-should-a-protein-have-just-one-shape-or-any-shape-for-that-matter/

So prion strains and the fact that alpha-synuclein amyloid aggregates produce different clinical disease despite having the same amino acid sequence was no surprise to me.

But it gets better.  The prion strains etc. etc may not be due to different structure but different decorations of the same structure by protein modifications.

The same is true for the different diseases that tau amyloid fibrils produce — never mind that they’ve been called neurofibrillary tangles and not amyloid, they have the same cross-beta structure.

A great paper [ Cell vol. 180 pp. 633 – 644 ’20 ] shows how different the tau protofilament from one disease (corticobasal degeneration) is from another (Alzheimer’s disease).  Figure three shows the side chain as it meanders around forming one ‘dish’ in the model above.  The meander is quite different in corticobasal degeneration (CBD) and Alzheimers.

It’s all the stuff tacked on. Tau is modified on its lysines (some 15% of all amino acids in the beta sheet forming part) by ubiquitination, acetylation and trimethylation, and by phosphorylation on serine.

Figure 3 is worth more of a look because it shows how different the post-translational modifications are of the same amino acid stretch of the tau protein in the Alzheimer’s and CBD.  Why has this not been seen before — because the amyloid was treated with pronase and other enzymes to get better pictures on cryoEM.  Isn’t that amazing.  Someone is probably looking to see if this explains prion strains.

The question arises — is the chain structure in space different because of the modifications, or are the modifications there because the chain structure in space is different.  This could go either way we have 500+ enzymes (protein kinases) putting phosphate on serine and/or threonine, each looking at a particular protein conformation around the two so they don’t phosphorylate everything — ditto for the enzymes that put ubiquitin on proteins.

Fascinating times.  Imagine something as simple as pronase hiding all this beautiful structure.

 

 

Has the holy grail for Parkinson’s disease been found?

Will the horribly named SynuClean-D treat Parkinsonism?  Here is the structure described  verbally.  Start with pyridine.  In the 2 position put benzene with a nitrogroup in the meta position, position 3 on pyridine NO2, position 4 CF3, position 5 CN (is this trouble?) position 6 OH.  That’s it.  Being great chemists you can immediately see what it does.

Back up a bit.  One of the pathologic findings in parkinsonism in the 450,000 dopamine neurons we have in the pars compacta at birth, is the Lewy body, which is largely made of the alpha-synuclein protein.  This is thought to kill the neurons in some way (just which form of alpha-synuclein is the culprit is still under debate — the monomer, the tetramer etc. etc).  Even the actual conformation of the monomer is still under debate (intrinsically disordered) etc. etc.

The following paper [ Proc. Natl. Acad. Sci. vo. 115 pp. 10481 – 10486 ’18 ] claims that SynuClean-D inhibits alpha-synuclein aggregation, disrupts mature amyloid fibrils made from it, prevents fibril propagation and abolishes the degeneration of dopamine neurons in an animal model of Parkinsonism.  Wow ! ! !

Time for some replication — look at the disaster from Harvard Med School about cardiac stem cells, with 30+ papers retracted. https://www.nytimes.com/2018/10/15/health/piero-anversa-fraud-retractions.html.  Ghastly.

Are the inclusions found in neurologic disease attempts at defense rather then the cause?

Thinking about pathologic changes in neurologic disease has been simplistic in the extreme.  Intially both senile plaques and neurofibrillary tangles were assumed to be causative for Alzheimer’s.  However there are 3 possible explanations for any microscopic change seen in any disease.  The first is that they are causative (the initial assumption).  The second is that they are a pile of spent bullets, which the neuron uses to defend itself against the real killer.  The third is they are tombstones, the final emanations of a dying cell.

A fascinating recent paper [ Neuron vol. 97 pp. 3 – 4, 108 – 124 ’18 ] http://www.cell.com/neuron/pdf/S0896-6273(17)31089-9.pdf gives strong evidence that some inclusions can be defensive rather than toxic.  It contains the following;

“In these studies, we found that formation of large inclusions was correlated with protection from a-synuclein toxicity”

The paper is likely to be a landmark because it ties two neurologic diseases (Parkinsonism and Alzheimer’s) together by showing that they may due to toxicity produced by single mechanism — inhibition of mitochondrial function.

Basically, the paper says that overproduction of alpha synuclein (the major component of the Lewy body inclusion of Parkinsonism) and tau (the major component of the neurofibrillary tangle of Alzheimer’s disease) produce death and destruction by interfering with mitochondria.  The mechanism is mislocalization of a protein called Drp1 which is important in mitochondrial function (it’s required for mitochondrial fission).

Actin isn’t just found in muscle, but is part of the cytoskeleton of every cell.  Alpha-synuclein is held to alter actin dynamics by binding to another protein called spectrin (which also binds to actin).  The net effect is to mislocalize Drp1 so it doesn’t bind to mitochondria where it is needed.  It isn’t clear to me from reading the paper, just where the Drp1 actually goes.

In any event overexpressing spectrin causes the alpha-synuclein to bind to it forming inclusions and protecting the cells.

There is a similar mechanism proposed for tau, and co-expressing alpha synuclein with Tau significantly enhances the toxicity of both models of tau toxicity which implies that they work by a common mechanism.

Grains of salt are required because the organism used for the model is the humble fruitfly (Drosophila).

We don’t understand amyloid very well

I must admit I was feeling pretty snarky about our understanding of amyloid and Alzheimer’s after the structure of Abeta42 was published.  In particular the structure explained why the alanine 42–> threonine 42 mutation was protective against Alzheimer’s disease while the alanine 42 –> valine 42 mutation increases the risk.  That’s all explained in the last post — https://luysii.wordpress.com/2017/10/12/abeta42-at-last/ — but a copy will appear at the end.

In that post I breathlessly hoped for the structure of aBeta40 which is known to be less toxic to neurons.  Well it’s here and it shows how little we understand about what does and what doesn’t form amyloid.  The structure appears in a paper about the amyloid formed by another protein (FUS) to be described later — Cell 171, 615–627, October 19, 2017 — figure 7 p. 624.

Now all Abeta40 lacks are the last 2 amino acids of Abeta42 — isoleucine at 41 and alanine at 42.  So solve the Schrodinger equation for it, and stack it up so it forms amyloid, or use your favorite molecular dynamics or other modeling tool.  Take a guess what it looks like.

Abeta42 is a dimer, a beta40 is a trimer, even though the first 40 amino acids of both are identical.

It gets worse. FUS (FUsed in Sarcoma) is a 526 amino acid protein which binds to RNA and is mostly found in the nucleus.  Neurologists are interested in it because over 50 mutations in have been found in amyotrophic lateral sclerosis (ALS) and frontotemporal dementia (FTD).   FUS contains a low complexity domain (LCD) of 214 amino acids, 80% of which are one of 4 amino acids (glycine, serine, glutamine and tyrosine).  At high protein concentrations this domain of FUS forms long unbundled fibrils with the characteristic crossBeta structure of amyloid.  Only 57/214 of the LCD amino acids are part of the structured core of the amyloid — the rest are disordered.

Even worse the amino acids forming the amyloid core (#39 -#95) are NOT predicted by a variety of computational methods predicting amyloid formation (Agrescan, FISH, FOLDamyloid, Metamyl, PASTA 2.0).  The percentages of gly, ser, gln and tyr in the core forming region are pretty much the same as in the whole protein.  The core forming region has no repeats longer than 4 amino acids.

The same figure 7 has the structure of the amyloid formed by alpha-synuclein, which accumulates in the Lewy bodies of Parkinson’s disease.  It just has one peptide per layer of amyloid.

When you really understand something you can predict things, not just describe them as they are revealed.

 

Abeta42 at last

It’s easy to see why cryoEM got the latest chemistry Nobel.  It is telling us so much.  Particularly fascinating to me as a retired neurologist is the structure of the Abeta42 fibril reported in last Friday’s Science (vol. 358 pp. 116 – 119 ’17).

Caveats first.  The materials were prepared using an aqueous solution at low pH containing an organic cosolvent — so how physiologic could the structure actually be?  It probably is physiologic as the neurotoxicity of the fibrils to neurons in culture was the same as fibrils grown at neutral pH.  This still isn’t the same as fibrils grown in the messy concentrated chemical soup known as the cytoplasm.  Tending to confirm their findings is the fact that NMR and Xray diffraction on the crystals produced the same result.

The fibrils were unbranched and microns long (implying at least 2,000 layers of the beta sheets to be described).  The beta sheets stack in parallel and in register giving the classic crossBeta sheet structure.  They were made of two protofilaments winding around each other.  Each protofilament contains all 42 amino acids of Abeta42 and all of them form a completely flat beta sheet structure.

Feast your eyes on figure 2 p. 117.  In addition to showing the two beta sheets of the two protofilaments, it shows how they bind to each other.  Aspartic acid #1 of one sheet binds to lysine #28 of the other.  Otherwise the interface is quite hydrophobic.  Alanine2 of one sheet binds to alanine42 of the other, valine39 of one sheet binds to valine 39 of the other.  Most importantly isoLeucine 41 of one sheet binds to glycine38 of the other.

This is important since the difference between the less toxic Abeta40 and the toxic Abeta 42 are two hydrophobic amino acids Isoleucine 41 and Alanine 42.  This makes for a tighter, longer, more hydrophobic interface between the protofilaments stabilizing them.

That’s just a guess.  I can’t wait for work on Abeta40 to be reported at this resolution.

A few other points.  The beta sheet of each protomer is quite planar, but the planes of the two protomers are tilted by 10 degrees accounting for the helicity of the fibril. The fibril is a rhombus whose longest edge is about 70 Angstroms.

Even better the structure explains a mutation which is protective against Alzheimer’s.  This remains the strongest evidence (to me at least) that Abeta peptides are significantly involved in Alzheimer’s disease, therapeutic failures based on this idea notwithstanding.  The mutation is a change of alanine2 to threonine which can’t possibly snuggle up hydrophobically to isoleucine nearly as well as alanine did. This should significantly weaken the link between the two protofilaments and make fibril formation more difficult.

The Abeta structure of the paper also explains another mutation. This one increases the risk of Alzheimer’s disease (like many others which have been discovered).  It involves the same amino acid (alanine2) but this time it is changed to the morehydrophobic valine, probably resulting in a stronger hydrophobic interaction with isoLeucine41 (assuming that valine’s greater bulk doesn’t get in the way sterically).

Wonderful stuff to think and speculate about, now that we actually have some solid data to chew on.