Tau Inclusions in Alzheimer's, Chronic Traumatic Encephalopathy and Pick's Disease. A Speculation on How Differences in Backbone Polarization Underlie Divergent Pathways of Tau Aggregation.

Tau-related dementias appear to involve specific to each disease aggregation pathways and morphologies of filamentous tau assemblies. To understand etiology of these differences, here we elucidate molecular mechanism of formation of tau PHFs based on the PMO theory of misfolding and aggregation of pleiomorphic proteins associated with neurodegenerative diseases. In this model, fibrillization of tau is initiated by the coupled binding and folding of the MTB domains that yields antiparallel homodimers, in analogy to folding of split inteins.

Protein folding, misfolding and aggregation: The importance of two-electron stabilizing interactions.

Proteins associated with neurodegenerative diseases are highly pleiomorphic and may adopt an all-α-helical fold in one environment, assemble into all-β-sheet or collapse into a coil in another, and rapidly polymerize in yet another one via divergent aggregation pathways that yield broad diversity of aggregates' morphology. A thorough understanding of this behaviour may be necessary to develop a treatment for Alzheimer's and related disorders. Unfortunately, our present comprehension of folding and misfolding is limited for want of a physicochemical theory of protein secondary and tertiary structure.

Single-site mutation and secondary structure stability: an isodesmic reaction approach. The case of unnatural amino acid mutagenesis Ala-->Lac.

A method is described to evaluate backbone interactions in proteins via computational unnatural amino acid mutagenesis. Several N-acetyl polyalanyl amides (AcA(n)NH(2)) were optimized in the representative helical (3(10)-, 4(13)-, and a "hybrid" kappa-helix, n = 7, 9, 10, 14) and hairpin (two- and three-stranded antiparallel beta-sheets with type I turns betaalphaalphaepsilon, n = 6, 9, 10) conformations, and extended conformers of N-acetyl polyalanyl methylamides (n = 2, 3) were used to derive multistranded beta-sheet fragments. Subsequently, each residue of every model structure was substituted, one at a time, with l-lactic acid.

Parabolic Relationship between the Basicity of the Nucleophile and pi-Face Selection in Addition of the Substituted Acetylide Ions to Cyclohexanone and Cyclohexanethione.

Energy changes, structural variation, and electron density shifts during nucleophilic addition to cyclohexanone and cyclohexanethione were examined by means of the ab initio calculations at the HF/6-31G level. The atomic charge on the carbonyl C was found to become more positive upon approach of the nucleophile; the density deformation maps suggest that the charge polarization occurs to a large extent in the pi bond. Since this effect is not compensated for by charge transfer until in the late stage of addition, the reaction site is considerably electron deficient (more so than the carbonyl C in the substrate) for most of the reaction path, and its interactions with the ligands are dominated by hyperconjugation with the vicinal C-H and C-C bonds.