The Relation Between α-Helical Conformation and Amyloidogenicity

Abstract

Amyloid fibrils are stable aggregates of misfolded proteins and polypeptides that are insoluble and resistant to protease activity. Abnormal formation of amyloid fibrils in vivo may lead to neurodegenerative disorders and other systemic amyloidosis such as Alzheimers, Parkinsons, and atherosclerosis. Because of their clinical importance amyloids are found under intense scientific research. Amyloidogenic sequences of short polypeptide segments within proteins are responsible for the transformation of correctly folded proteins into parts of larger amyloid fibrils. The -helical secondary structure is believed to host many amyloidogenic sequences and be a key player in different stages of the amyloidogenesis process. Most of the studies on amyloids focus on the role of amyloidogenic sequences. The focus of this study is the relation between amyloidogenicity and the structure of the amyloidogenic -helical sequence. We have previously shown that the -helical conformation may be expressed by two parameters ({theta} and{rho} ) that form orthogonal coordinates based on the Ramachandran dihedrals ({varphi} and{psi} ) and provide an illuminating interpretation of the -helical conformation. By performing statistical analysis on -helical conformations found in the protein data bank, an apparent relation between -helical conformation, as expressed by{theta} and{rho} , and amyloidogenicity is revealed. Remarkably, random amino acid sequences, whose helical structure was obtained from the most probably dihedral angles as obtained from PDB data, revealed the same dependency of amyloidogenicity, suggesting the importance of -helical structure as opposed to sequence.