Amyloid Structure at Last ! – 2 Birefringence

This was the state of the art 19 years ago in a PNAS paper (vol. 99 pp. 16742 – 16747 ’02).  “Amyloid fibrils are filamentous structures with typical diameters of 10 nanoMeters and lengths up to several microns.  No high resolution molecular structure of an amyloid fibril has yet been determined experimentally because amyloid fibrils are noncrystalline solid materials and are therefore incompatible with Xray crystallography and liquid state NMR.”

Well solid state NMR and cryo electron microscopy have changed all that and we now have structures for many amyloids at near atomic resolution.  It’s probably behind a pay wall but look at Cell vol. 184 pp. 4857 – 4873 ’21 if you have a chance.  I’ve spent the last week or so with it, and a series of posts on various aspects of the paper will be forthcoming.  The paper contains far too much to cram into a single post.

So lacking an Xray machine to do diffraction, what did we have 57 years ago when I started getting seriously interested in neurology?  To find amyloid we threw a dye called Congo Red on a slide, found that it bound amyloid and became birefringent when it did so.

Although the Cell paper doesn’t even mention Congo Red, the structure of amyloid they give explains why this worked.

What is birefringence anyway?  It means that light moving through a material travels at different speeds in different directions.  The refractive index of a material is the relative speed of light through that material versus the speed of light in a vacuum.   Stand in a shallow pool.  Your legs look funny because light travels slower in water than in air (which is nearly a vacuum).

Look at the structure of Congo Red — https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Congo_red.  It’s a long thin planar molecule, containing 6 aromatic rings, kept planar with each other by pi electron delocalization.

The previous post contained a more detailed description of amyloid — but suffice it to say that instead of wandering around in 3 dimensional space, the protein backbone in amyloid is confined to a single plane 4.8 Angstroms thick — here’s a link — https://luysii.wordpress.com/2021/10/11/amyloid-structure-at-last/

Plane after plane stacks on top of each other in amyloid.  So a micron (which is 10,000 Angstroms) can contain over 5,000 such planes, and an amyloid fibril can be several microns long.

It isn’t hard to imagine the Congo Red molecule slipping between the sheets, making it’s orientation fixed.  Sounds almost pornographic doesn’t it? This orients the molecule and clearly light moving perpendicular to the long axis of Congo Red will move at a different speed than light going parallel to the long axis of Congo Red, hence its birefringence when the dye binds amyloid.

Well B-DNA (the form we all know and love as the double helix) has its aromatic bases stacked on top of each other every 3.4 Angstroms.  So why isn’t it birefringent with Congo Red?  It has a persistence length of 150 basePairs or about .05 microns, which means that the average orientation is averaged out, unlike the amyloid in a senile plaque

There is tons more to come.  The Cell paper is full of fascinating stuff.

The uses of disorder

There was a lot of shock and awe about a report showing how seemingly minor changes in an aliphatic group on benzene led to markedly different conformations in its protein target (lysozyme from bacteriophage T4) http://pipeline.corante.com/archives/2015/06/18/tiny_and_not_so_tiny_changes.php.

Our noses are being rubbed in just how floppy proteins are, in contrast to the first glimpses of protein structure obtained by Xray crystallography. Back then we knew so little about proteins, that seeing all the atoms laid out in alpha helices and beta sheets was incredibly compelling. We talked about the structure of a protein rather than a structure. Even back then, with hemoglobin (one of the first solved proteins) it was obvious that proteins had to have more than one structure. The porphyrin ring in heme that oxygen binds to is buried deep in hemoglobin, and the initial structure had to move in some way to allow oxygen to find its way in (because the initial structure showed no obvious channel for oxygen). So hemoglobin had to breathe.

We now know that many proteins have intrinsically disordered segments. Amazingly, the most recent estimate I could find in my notes (or in Wikipedia) is this — It is estimated that over 30% of eukaryotic proteins have stretches of over 30 amino acids that are intrinsically disordered [ J. Mol. Biol. vol. 337 pp. 635 – 645 ’04 ]. Does anyone out there know of more recent data?

We’re a lot smarter now — here’s a comment on Derek’s post — “I have always thought crystal structures of proteins/enzymes are more a guide than actually useful. You are crystallizing a protein first-proteins don’t pack like that in vivo. Then you are settling on the conformation that freezes out- is this the lowest energy form? Then you are ignoring hte fact that these are highly dynamic structures that are constantly moving, sliding, shaking, adjusting. Then if you put a ligand in there you get the lowest energy form-which is what it would look like after reaction and before ligand dissociation- this is quite different from what it can look like at other stages of the reaction.”

Here is an interesting example of the uses of protein disorder going on right now in just about every neuron in your body. Most neurons have long processes, far too long for diffusion to move a needed protein to their ends. For that purpose we have microtubules (aka neurotubules in neurons) stretching the length of the processes, onto which two types of motors attach (dyneins which moves things to negative end of the microtubule and kinesins which move things to the positive end).

The microtubule is built from a heterodimer of two proteins (alpha and beta tubulin). Each contains about 450 amino acids and forms a globule 40 Angstroms (4 nanoMeters) in diameter. The heterodimers pack end to end to form a protofilament. 13 protofilaments line up side by side to form the microtubule, a hollow structure about 250 Angstroms in diameter. In cells microtubules are 1 to 10 microns long, but in nerve process they can be ‘up to’ 100 microns in length. Even at 1 micron (1,000 nanoMeters) that’s 13 * 250 heterodimers in a microtubule.

Any protein structure this important has a lot of modifications imposed on it to alter structure and function. Examples include phosphorylation and the addition of glutamic acid chains (polyglutamylation). The carboxy terminal tails of alpha and beta tubulin are flexible and stick out from the tubulin rod (which is why they aren’t seen on Xray crystallography). The carboxy terminal tail is the site of post-translational glutamylation. The enzyme polyglutamylating the carboxy terminal tail of beta tubular is TTLL7 (you don’t want to know what the acronym stands for). It binds to the alpha/beta tubular heterodimer by an intrinsically disordered region of its own (becoming structured in the process), then it binds to the intrinsically disordered carboxyl terminal tails, structuring them and modifying them. It’s basically a mating dance. There is a precedent for this — see https://luysii.wordpress.com/2013/12/29/the-mating-dance-of-a-promiscuous-protein/

So disordered regions of proteins although structureless are far from functionless