Parkinson's disease (PD) is a movement disorder characterized by the loss of dopaminergic neurons in the substantia nigra and the formation of intraneuronal inclusions called Lewy bodies, which are composed mainly of α-synuclein (α-syn). Selegiline (Sel) is a noncompetitive monoamino oxidase B inhibitor that has neuroprotective effects and has been administered to PD patients as monotherapy or ...

The impact of estrogen depletion and drug treatment on type I collagen fibril nanomorphology and collagen fibril packing (microstructure) was evaluated by atomic force microscopy (AFM) using an ovariectomized (OVX) rabbit model of estrogen deficiency induced bone loss. Nine month-old New Zealand white female rabbits were treated as follows: sham-operated (Sham; n = 11), OVX + vehicle (OVX + Veh...

A new visualization method of insulin amyloid fibril has been presented via conventional scanning electron microscopy (SEM), which can be applied to confirm the formation and any effect additives. We have demonstrated that native fibrils imaged without metal coating on silicon substrate were attributed attenuation upon collected secondary electrons. The SEM observations consistently showed dist...

A critical step of β-amyloid fibril formation is fibril elongation in which amyloid-β monomers undergo structural transitions to fibrillar structures upon their binding to fibril tips. The atomic detail of the structural transitions remains poorly understood. Computational characterization of the structural transitions is limited so far to short Aβ segments (5-10 aa) owing to the long time scal...

The mineral in bone is located primarily within the collagen fibril, and during mineralization the fibril is formed first and then water within the fibril is replaced with mineral. The collagen fibril therefore provides the aqueous compartment in which mineral grows. Although knowledge of the size of molecules that can diffuse into the fibril to affect crystal growth is critical to understandin...

Using implicit solvent molecular dynamics and replica exchange simulations, we study the impact of ibuprofen on the growth of wild-type Abeta fibrils. We show that binding of ibuprofen to Abeta destabilizes the interactions between incoming peptides and the fibril. As a result, ibuprofen interference modifies the free energy landscape of fibril growth and reduces the free energy gain of Abeta p...