1. Heterogeneous Seeding of a Prion Structure by a Generic Amyloid Form of the Fungal Prion-forming Domain HET-s(218–289)*
- Author
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David E. Wemmer, William Wan, Michele McDonald, Gerald Stubbs, Aleksandra Kijac, and Wen Bian
- Subjects
Models, Molecular ,Aging ,Secondary ,Protein Folding ,Magnetic Resonance Spectroscopy ,Seeding ,Neurodegenerative ,Protein aggregation ,Alzheimer's Disease ,Biochemistry ,Medical and Health Sciences ,Protein Structure, Secondary ,X-Ray Diffraction ,Models ,Structural Biology ,2.1 Biological and endogenous factors ,Prion Transmission ,Aetiology ,Fungal protein ,Chemistry ,Biological Sciences ,Recombinant Proteins ,Infectious Diseases ,Fiber Diffraction ,Neurological ,Protein Structure and Folding ,Protein folding ,Fiber diffraction ,Protein Structure ,Biochemistry & Molecular Biology ,Amyloid ,Self-propagation ,Prions ,macromolecular substances ,Fibril ,Fungal Proteins ,Rare Diseases ,Podospora ,Acquired Cognitive Impairment ,Molecular Biology ,Alzheimer's Disease including Alzheimer's Disease Related Dementias (AD/ADRD) ,Transmissible Spongiform Encephalopathy (TSE) ,Molecular ,Cell Biology ,Protein Aggregation ,Brain Disorders ,Fungal prion ,Protein Structure, Tertiary ,Emerging Infectious Diseases ,Good Health and Well Being ,Structural biology ,Chemical Sciences ,Biophysics ,Dementia ,Peptides ,Tertiary - Abstract
The fungal prion-forming domain HET-s(218-289) forms infectious amyloid fibrils at physiological pH that were shown by solid-state NMR to be assemblies of a two-rung β-solenoid structure. Under acidic conditions, HET-s(218-289) has been shown to form amyloid fibrils that have very low infectivity in vivo, but structural information about these fibrils has been very limited. We show by x-ray fiber diffraction that the HET-s(218-289) fibrils formed under acidic conditions have a stacked β-sheet architecture commonly found in short amyloidogenic peptides and denatured protein aggregates. At physiological pH, stacked β-sheet fibrils nucleate the formation of the infectious β-solenoid prions in a process of heterogeneous seeding, but do so with kinetic profiles distinct from those of spontaneous or homogeneous (seeded with infectious β-solenoid fibrils) fibrillization. Several serial passages of stacked β-sheet-seeded solutions lead to fibrillization kinetics similar to homogeneously seeded solutions. Our results directly show that structural mutation can occur between substantially different amyloid architectures, lending credence to the suggestion that the processes of strain adaptation and crossing species barriers are facilitated by structural mutation. © 2013 by The American Society for Biochemistry and Molecular Biology, Inc.
- Published
- 2013
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