Using bacterial inclusion bodies to screen for amyloid aggregation inhibitors

Microbial Cell Factories

Technical Notes

Salvador Ventura¹  Anna Villar-Piqué¹  Alba Espargaró²  Raimon Sabaté³  Natalia S de Groot⁴ 

[1] Departament de Bioquímica i Biologia Molecular, Facultat de Biociències, Universitat Autònoma de Barcelona, E-08193, Bellaterra, Spain;Institut de Biotecnologia i de Biomedicina, Universitat Autònoma de Barcelona, E-08193, Bellaterra, Spain;Institut de Biotecnologia i de Biomedicina, Universitat Autònoma de Barcelona, E-08193, Bellaterra, Spain;Institut de Biotecnologia i de Biomedicina, Universitat Autònoma de Barcelona, E-08193, Bellaterra, Spain;Departament de Fisicoquímica, Facultat de Farmàcia, Universitat de Barcelona, Avda. Joan XXIII, 08028, Barcelona, Spain;Institut de Biotecnologia i de Biomedicina, Universitat Autònoma de Barcelona, E-08193, Bellaterra, Spain;Medical Research Council Laboratory of Molecular Biology, Hills Road, CB2 0QH, Cambridge, United Kingdom;

关键词: Amyloids;    Inclusion bodies;    Protein folding;    Protein aggregation;    Metals;    Alzheimer;   

DOI  :  10.1186/1475-2859-11-55

 received in 2012-01-21, accepted in 2012-05-03,  发布年份 2012

来源: Springer

【 摘 要 】

BackgroundThe amyloid-β peptide (Aβ42) is the main component of the inter-neuronal amyloid plaques characteristic of Alzheimer's disease (AD). The mechanism by which Aβ42 and other amyloid peptides assemble into insoluble neurotoxic deposits is still not completely understood and multiple factors have been reported to trigger their formation. In particular, the presence of endogenous metal ions has been linked to the pathogenesis of AD and other neurodegenerative disorders.ResultsHere we describe a rapid and high-throughput screening method to identify molecules able to modulate amyloid aggregation. The approach exploits the inclusion bodies (IBs) formed by Aβ42 when expressed in bacteria. We have shown previously that these aggregates retain amyloid structural and functional properties. In the present work, we demonstrate that their in vitro refolding is selectively sensitive to the presence of aggregation-promoting metal ions, allowing the detection of inhibitors of metal-promoted amyloid aggregation with potential therapeutic interest.ConclusionsBecause IBs can be produced at high levels and easily purified, the method overcomes one of the main limitations in screens to detect amyloid modulators: the use of expensive and usually highly insoluble synthetic peptides.

【 授权许可】

Unknown   
© Villar-Pique et al.; licensee BioMed Central Ltd. 2012. This article is published under license to BioMed Central Ltd. This is an Open Access article distributed under the terms of the Creative Commons Attribution License (http://creativecommons.org/licenses/by/2.0), which permits unrestricted use, distribution, and reproduction in any medium, provided the original work is properly cited.