UCL Discovery
UCL home » Library Services » Electronic resources » UCL Discovery

Structural Identification of Individual Helical Amyloid Filaments by Integration of Cryo-Electron Microscopy-Derived Maps in Comparative Morphometric Atomic Force Microscopy Image Analysis

Lutter, Liisa; Al-Hilaly, Youssra K; Serpell, Christopher J; Tuite, Mick F; Wischik, Claude M; Serpell, Louise C; Xue, Wei-Feng; (2022) Structural Identification of Individual Helical Amyloid Filaments by Integration of Cryo-Electron Microscopy-Derived Maps in Comparative Morphometric Atomic Force Microscopy Image Analysis. Journal of Molecular Biology , 434 (7) , Article 167466. 10.1016/j.jmb.2022.167466. Green open access

[thumbnail of 1-s2.0-S0022283622000304-main.pdf]
Preview
PDF
1-s2.0-S0022283622000304-main.pdf - Published Version

Download (1MB) | Preview

Abstract

The presence of amyloid fibrils is a hallmark of more than 50 human disorders, including neurodegenerative diseases and systemic amyloidoses. A key unresolved challenge in understanding the involvement of amyloid in disease is to explain the relationship between individual structural polymorphs of amyloid fibrils, in potentially mixed populations, and the specific pathologies with which they are associated. Although cryo-electron microscopy (cryo-EM) and solid-state nuclear magnetic resonance (ssNMR) spectroscopy methods have been successfully employed in recent years to determine the structures of amyloid fibrils with high resolution detail, they rely on ensemble averaging of fibril structures in the entire sample or significant subpopulations. Here, we report a method for structural identification of individual fibril structures imaged by atomic force microscopy (AFM) by integration of high-resolution maps of amyloid fibrils determined by cryo-EM in comparative AFM image analysis. This approach was demonstrated using the hitherto structurally unresolved amyloid fibrils formed in vitro from a fragment of tau (297–391), termed ‘dGAE’. Our approach established unequivocally that dGAE amyloid fibrils bear no structural relationship to heparin-induced tau fibrils formed in vitro. Furthermore, our comparative analysis resulted in the prediction that dGAE fibrils are structurally closely related to the paired helical filaments (PHFs) isolated from Alzheimer’s disease (AD) brain tissue characterised by cryo-EM. These results show the utility of individual particle structural analysis using AFM, provide a workflow of how cryo-EM data can be incorporated into AFM image analysis and facilitate an integrated structural analysis of amyloid polymorphism.

Type: Article
Title: Structural Identification of Individual Helical Amyloid Filaments by Integration of Cryo-Electron Microscopy-Derived Maps in Comparative Morphometric Atomic Force Microscopy Image Analysis
Location: Netherlands
Open access status: An open access version is available from UCL Discovery
DOI: 10.1016/j.jmb.2022.167466
Publisher version: https://doi.org/10.1016/j.jmb.2022.167466
Language: English
Additional information: © The Author(s), 2022. This is an Open Access article distributed under the terms of the Creative Commons Attribution Licence (CC BY 4.0), which permits unrestricted use, distribution, and reproduction in any medium, provided the original work is properly cited. https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by/4.0/
Keywords: atomic force microscopy, amyloid, polymorphism, structural biology, cryo-electron microscopy
UCL classification: UCL
UCL > Provost and Vice Provost Offices > School of Life and Medical Sciences
UCL > Provost and Vice Provost Offices > School of Life and Medical Sciences > Faculty of Life Sciences
UCL > Provost and Vice Provost Offices > School of Life and Medical Sciences > Faculty of Life Sciences > UCL School of Pharmacy
UCL > Provost and Vice Provost Offices > School of Life and Medical Sciences > Faculty of Life Sciences > UCL School of Pharmacy > Pharma and Bio Chemistry
URI: https://discovery.ucl.ac.uk/id/eprint/10204801
Downloads since deposit
20Downloads
Download activity - last month
Download activity - last 12 months
Downloads by country - last 12 months

Archive Staff Only

View Item View Item