Chemists reveal amyloid structure
Amyloids are clumps of protein fragments that stick together to form stringy fibrils such as the plaques seen in the brains of Alzheimer’s patients. Many of these proteins bind to metals such as zinc, but the structure of these metal-bound proteins has been difficult to study. The importance of these metals to the activity of amyloids thus remains an open question, which is all the more perplexing because some amyloids are associated with disease but others are not. A team of MIT chemists, working with researchers at the University of California at San Francisco (UCSF) and Syracuse University, has now deciphered the structure of an amyloid that binds to zinc. Their approach, based on nuclear magnetic resonance (NMR), could also be used to reveal the structures of additional metal-bound amyloids. “Even though there has been a lot of high-resolution, atomic level structural work on amyloids by solid-state NMR, people have really not studied...