Quantitative understanding of the kinetics of fibril formation and the molecular mechanism of transition from monomers to fibrils is needed to obtain insights into the growth of amyloid fibrils and more generally self-assembly multisubunit protein complexes. Significant advances using computations of protein aggregation in a number of systems have established generic and sequence-specific aspects of the early steps in oligomer formation. Theoretical considerations, which view oligomer and fibril growth as diffusion in a complex energy landscape, and computational studies, involving minimal lattice and coarse-grained models, have revealed general principles governing the transition from monomeric protein to ordered fibrillar aggregates. Detailed atomistic calculations have explored the early stages of the protein aggregation pathway for a number of amyloidogenic proteins linked to various diseases. These computational studies have provided insights into the role of sequence, role of water, and specific interatomic interactions underlying the thermodynamics and dynamics of elementary kinetic steps in the aggregation pathway. We show that a variety of theoretical approaches, ranging from scaling arguments to minimalmodels to atomistic simulations, are needed as a complement to experimental studies probing the principles governing protein aggregation. J.E. Straub and D. Thirumalai, Curr. Opin. Struc. Bio. 20, 187-195 (2010). J.E. Straub and D. Thirumalai, Ann. Rev. Phys. Chem. 62, 437-463 (2011). D. Thirumalai, G. Reddy, and J. E. Straub, Acc. Chem. Res. 45, 83-92 (2012).

Toward a molecular theory of early and late events in monomer to amyloid fibril formation

249th National Meeting (2015)

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