Because of the insolubility and polymeric properties of amyloid fibrils, techniques used conventionally to analyze protein structure and dynamics have often been hampered. Ultrasonication can induce the monomeric solution of amyloidogenic proteins to form amyloid fibrils. However, ultrasonication can break down preformed fibrils into shorter fibrils. Here, combining these 2 opposing effects on 2-microglobulin (2-m), a protein responsible for dialysisrelated amyloidosis, we present that ultrasonication pulses are useful for preparing monodispersed amyloid fibrils of minimal size with an average molecular weight of Ϸ1,660,000 (140-mer). The production of minimal and monodispersed fibrils is achieved by the free energy minimum under competition between fibril production and breakdown. The small homogeneous fibrils will be of use for characterizing the structure and dynamics of amyloid fibrils, advancing molecular understanding of amyloidosis.2-microglobulin ͉ dialysis-related amyloidosis ͉ protein misfolding ͉ analytical ultracentrifugation A myloid fibrils are supramolecular assemblies exhibiting a long unbranched fibrillar morphology Ϸ10 nanometers in diameter, the deposition of which is associated with Ͼ30 degenerative diseases including Alzheimer's disease, prion disease, and dialysis-related amyloidosis (1-3). The past decade has seen progress in our biophysical understanding of amyloid fibrils using various approaches including solution and solid state NMR (4-6) and X-ray crystallography (7,8). However, the polymeric properties of amyloid fibrils, where huge size and heterogeneous nature result in insoluble and noncrystalline assemblies, are an obstacle to techniques such as X-ray crystallography, solution NMR spectroscopy and other conventional spectroscopic measurements. To overcome the analytical problems confronting studies of amyloid fibrils, it is worth establishing a strategy for producing monodispersed samples of amyloid fibrils. If amyloid fibrils of a well-defined molecular weight and improved solubility are formed reproducibly, a more general application of various types of fibril samples to a series of preexisting spectroscopic measurements will be accomplished.As a strategy to produce amyloid fibrils of uniform and minimal size, ultrasonication has several potential applications. Although ultrasonication was originally used to prepare seeds from preformed fibrils (9), which were further applied to the amplification of infectious prion proteins (10, 11), ultrasonication-dependent fragmentation is becoming an important approach to analyzing the properties of fibrils (12, 13). However, its strong effect of agitation has recently been found to accelerate the fibril nucleation of several proteins and peptides (14-18). Interestingly, amyloid fibrils produced by ultrasonicationinduced fibrillation were very short with apparently similar lengths as determined by AFM (15,19), suggesting that short fibrils of homogeneous molecular size are formed efficiently under ultrasonication in combination with the...