Issue December 2009

category image Volume 27
No. 3 (p 245-398)
December 2009
ISSN 0739-110

Simulation Studies on the Stabilities of Aggregates Formed by Fibril-Forming Segments of α-Synuclein (p. 259-269)

We performed molecular dynamics simulations for various oligomers with different β-sheet conformations consisting of α-Synuclein 71-82 residues using an all atom force field and explicit water model. Tetramers of antiparallel β-sheet are shown to be stable, whereas parallel sheets are highly unstable due to the repulsive interactions between bulky and polar side chains as well as the weaker backbone hydrogen bonds. We also investigated the stabilities of double antiparallel β-sheets stacked with asymmetric and symmetric geometries. Our results show that this 12 amino acid residue peptide can form stable β-sheet conformers at 320K and higher temperatures. The backbone hydrogen bonds in β-sheet and the steric packing between hydrophobic side chains between β-sheets are shown to give conformational stabilities.

Jeseong Yoon1
Soonmin Jang2
Kyunghee Lee2
Seokmin Shin1,*

1School of Chemistry,
Seoul National University,
Seoul 151-747, Korea
2Department of Chemistry,
Sejong University,
Seoul 143-747, Korea

Phone: 82-2-880-6639
Fax: 82-2-889-1568
E-mail: sshin@snu.ac.kr

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