Researchers at the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill have introduced an innovative drug delivery system using amyloid fibers that respond to body heat by untwisting, potentially offering a new way to treat neurodegenerative diseases. This system builds on the understanding of how amyloid plaques, associated with Alzheimer’s disease, form and progress, offering hope for reversing their effects.
UNC-Chapel Hill researcher Ronit Freeman is leading a research group with investigators from the Lynn lab at Emory University looked at the core beta amyloid-42 peptide, the key portion driving amyloid plaque assembly and deposits in the brains of patients with Alzheimer’s disease. By creating synthetic variations of the peptide in the lab, they were able to discover how to control the way that these molecules assemble and twist.
Using advanced spectroscopic techniques, the researchers probed how individual peptides interact, revealing information about assembly rates, distances between peptides, peptide alignment, and importantly the direction of twist. High-resolution electron and fluorescent microscopy were used to characterize the morphology of the materials at different temperatures.
The investigators identified that the N-terminal domain of the peptide is important for programming the shape of the assembly such as tubes, ribbons, or fibers, while C-terminal modifications direct either a left- or right-handed twist within the material. Using these design rules, a series of peptides were tuned to switch on-demand between left-handed and right-handed twisted ribbons in response to changing temperatures.
Reference: “Uncovering supramolecular chirality codes for the design of tunable biomaterials” by Stephen J. Klawa, Michelle Lee, Kyle D. Riker, Tengyue Jian, Qunzhao Wang, Yuan Gao, Margaret L. Daly, Shreeya Bhonge, W. Seth Childers, Tolulope O. Omosun, Anil K. Mehta, David G. Lynn and Ronit Freeman, 26 January 2024,SciTechDaily: Home of the best science and technology news since 1998. Keep up with the latest scitech news via email or social media.