The most common isoforms of amyloid-β (Aβ) proteins are composed of 40 or 42 amino acid residues. While Aβ-(1-40) is the predominant species, Aβ-(1-42) is more fibrillogenic and neurotoxic, suggesting that Aβ-(1-42) plays a critical role in the initiation of amyloid fibril formation. We investigated the mechanisms by which soluble Aβ-(1-40) associates with preformed Aβ-(1-42) seeds. A paramagne...

Drug design studies targeting one of the primary toxic agents in Alzheimer's disease, soluble oligomers of amyloid β-protein (Aβ), have been complicated by the rapid, heterogeneous aggregation of Aβ and the resulting difficulty to structurally characterize the peptide. To address this, we have developed [Nle(35), D-Pro(37)]Aβ(42), a substituted peptide inspired from molecular dynamics simulatio...

BACKGROUND Recent studies consistently reported Alzheimer's disease (AD) and, to a lower extent, mild cognitive impairment (MCI) to be accompanied by reduced cerebrospinal fluid (CSF) levels of β-amyloid. However, how these changes are related to brain morphological alterations is so far only partly understood. METHODS CSF levels of β-amyloid (1-42) were examined with respect to cerebral atro...

Beta-amyloid (Aβ) accumulation, one of the most important pathogenic traits of Alzheimer's disease (AD), has been reported to induce neurotoxicity in vitro as well as in vivo. Honokiol, isolated from the bark of Magnolia officinalis, has neuroprotective effects in different models of AD in vivo and in vitro. However, the exact mechanism for its neuroprotective effect is not well understood. The...

Several amyloid-forming proteins and peptides, including insulin 1 , β-lactoglobulin 2 and albumin 3 , form spherulites in vitro under non-physiological solution conditions. These micrometer-sized, roughly spherical structures are composed of ordered arrays of β sheets of amyloid fibrils in radial arrangements which, characteristically, show a typical Maltese cross pattern of light extinction u...

Emerging evidence suggests that activated astrocytes play important roles in AD, and β-asarone, a major component of Acorus tatarinowii Schott, was shown to be a potential therapeutic candidate for AD. While our previous study found that β-asarone could improve the cognitive function of rats hippocampally injected with Aβ, the effects of β-asarone on astrocytes remain unclear, and this study ai...

β-amyloid 1-42 (Aβ1-42) is a self-assembling peptide that goes through many conformational and morphological changes before forming the fibrils that are deposited in extracellular plaques characteristic of Alzheimer's disease. The link between Aβ1-42 structure and toxicity is of major interest, in particular, the neurotoxic potential of oligomeric species. Many studies utilise reversed (Aβ42-1)...