A synchrotron-based hydroxyl radical footprinting analysis of amyloid fibrils and prefibrillar intermediates with residue-specific resolution.

ABSTRACT: Structural models of the fibrils formed by the 40-residue amyloid-? (A?40) peptide in Alzheimer's disease typically consist of linear polypeptide segments, oriented approximately perpendicular to the long axis of the fibril, and joined together as parallel in-register ?-sheets to form filaments. However, various models differ in the number of filaments that run the length of a fibril, and in the topological arrangement of these filaments. In addition to questions about the structure of A?40 monomers in fibrils, there are important unanswered questions about their structure in prefibrillar intermediates, which are of interest because they may represent the most neurotoxic form of A?40. To assess different models of fibril structure and to gain insight into the structure of prefibrillar intermediates, the relative solvent accessibility of amino acid residue side chains in fibrillar and prefibrillar A?40 preparations was characterized in solution by hydroxyl radical footprinting and structural mass spectrometry. A key to the application of this technology was the development of hydroxyl radical reactivity measures for individual side chains of A?40. Combined with mass-per-length measurements performed by dark-field electron microscopy, the results of this study are consistent with the core filament structure represented by two- and three-filament solid state nuclear magnetic resonance-based models of the A?40 fibril (such as 2LMN , 2LMO , 2LMP , and 2LMQ ), with minor refinements, but they are inconsistent with the more recently proposed 2M4J model. The results also demonstrate that individual A?40 fibrils exhibit structural heterogeneity or polymorphism, where regions of two-filament structure alternate with regions of three-filament structure. The footprinting approach utilized in this study will be valuable for characterizing various fibrillar and nonfibrillar forms of the A? peptide.

SUBMITTER: Klinger AL 

PROVIDER: S-EPMC4270378 | biostudies-literature | 2014 Dec

REPOSITORIES: biostudies-literature