Abstract
Nonfibrillar soluble oligomers, which are likely to be transient intermediates in the transitions from monomers to amyloid fibrils, may be a toxic species in Alzheimer’s disease. For this reason it is very important to understand early events that direct assembly of amyloidogenic peptides. Using all-atom simulations with the GROMOS96 force field 43a1 in explicit water, we have recently shown that the oligomerization of Aβ16–22 peptides obeys the dock-lock mechanism. We have also proposed a toy lattice model, which allows us to ascertain this conclusion using a much larger number of monomers. In this contribution we review our all-atom as well as lattice simulation results on the dock-lock mechanism of short peptides, which is probably a generic mechanism for fibril elongation of proteins and long peptides.
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The text was submitted by the author in English.