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BackgroundThe definitive indicator of Alzheimer’s disease (AD) pathology is the profuse accumulation of amyloid-ß (Aß) within the brain. Various in vitro and cell-based models have been proposed for high throughput drug screening for potential therapeutic benefit in diseases of protein misfolding. Caenorhabditis elegans offers a convenient in vivo system for examination of Aß accumulation and toxicity in a complex multicellular organism. Ease of culturing and a short life cycle make this animal model well suited to rapid screening of candidate compounds.ResultsWe have generated a new transgenic strain of C. elegans that expresses full length Aß1-42. This strain differs from existing Aß models that predominantly express amino-truncated Aß3-42. The Aß1-42 is expressed in body wall muscle cells, where it oligomerizes, aggregates and results in severe, and fully penetrant, age progressive-paralysis. The in vivo accumulation of Aß1-42 also stains positive for amyloid dyes, consistent with in vivo fibril formation. The utility of this model for identification of potential protective compounds was examined using the investigational Alzheimer’s therapeutic PBT2, shown to be neuroprotective in mouse models of AD and significantly improve cognition in AD patients. We observed that treatment with PBT2 provided rapid and significant protection against the Aß-induced toxicity in C. elegans.ConclusionThis C. elegans model of full length Aß1-42 expression can now be adopted for use in screens to rapidly identify and assist in development of potential therapeutics and to study underlying toxic mechanism(s) of Aß.

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Protein interaction networks are becoming an increasingly important area of research within structural genomics. Here we present an ion mobility-mass spectrometry approach capable of distinguishing the overall subunit architecture of protein complexes. The approach relies on the simultaneous measurement in the gas phase of the mass and size of intact assemblies and subcomplexes. These data are then used as restraints to generate topological models of protein complexes. To test and develop our method, we have chosen two well-characterized homo-dodecameric protein complexes: ornithine carbamoyl transferase and glutamine synthetase. By forming subcomplexes related to the comparative strength of the subunit interfaces, acquiring ion mobility data, and subsequent modeling, we show that these "building blocks" retain their native interactions and do not undergo major rearrangement in either solution or gas phases. We apply this approach to study two subcomplexes of the human eukaryotic initiation factor 3, for which there is no high-resolution structure.

The ability to identify inhibitors of protein–protein interactions represents a major challenge in modern drug discovery and in the development of tools for chemical biology. In recent years, fragment-based approaches have emerged as a new methodology in drug discovery; however, few examples of small molecules that are active against chemotherapeutic targets have been published. Herein, we describe the fragment-based approach of targeting the interaction between the tumour suppressor BRCA2 and the recombination enzyme RAD51; it makes use of a screening pipeline of biophysical techniques that we expect to be more generally applicable to similar targets. Disruption of this interaction in vivo is hypothesised to give rise to cellular hypersensitivity to radiation and genotoxic drugs. We have used protein engineering to create a monomeric form of RAD51 by humanising a thermostable archaeal orthologue, RadA, and used this protein for fragment screening. The initial fragment hits were thoroughly validated biophysically by isothermal titration calorimetry (ITC) and NMR techniques and observed by X-ray crystallography to bind in a shallow surface pocket that is occupied in the native complex by the side chain of a phenylalanine from the conserved FxxA interaction motif found in BRCA2. This represents the first report of fragments or any small molecule binding at this protein–protein interaction site.