Guillaume Lamour, Roy Nassar, Patrick H W Chan, Gunes Bozkurt, Jixi Li, Jennifer M Bui, Calvin K Yip, Thibault Mayor, Hongbin Li, Hao Wu, Jörg A Gsponer
Amyloids are fibrillar nanostructures of proteins that are assembled in several physiological processes in human cells (e.g., hormone storage) but also during the course of infectious (prion) and noninfectious (nonprion) diseases such as Creutzfeldt-Jakob and Alzheimer's diseases, respectively. How the amyloid state, a state accessible to all proteins and peptides, can be exploited for functional purposes but also have detrimental effects remains to be determined. Here, we measure the nanomechanical properties of different amyloids and link them to features found in their structure models...
February 28, 2017: Biophysical Journal