Self‐Assembled Cyclic d,l‐α‐Peptides as Generic Conformational Inhibitors of the α‐Synuclein Aggregation and Toxicity: In Vitro and Mechanistic Studies

Many peptides and proteins with large sequences and structural differences self‐assemble into disease‐causing amyloids that share very similar biochemical and biophysical characteristics, which may contribute to their cross‐interaction. Here, we demonstrate how the self‐assembled, cyclic d,l ‐α‐peptide CP‐2 , which has similar structural and functional properties to those of amyloids, acts as a generic inhibitor of the Parkinson′s disease associated α‐synuclein (α‐syn) aggregation to toxic oligomers by an ?off‐pathway“ mechanism. We show that CP‐2 interacts with the N‐terminal and the non‐amyloid‐β component region of α‐syn, which are responsible for α‐syn′s membrane intercalation and self‐assembly, thus changing the overall conformation of α‐syn. CP‐2 also remodels α‐syn fibrils to nontoxic amorphous species and permeates cells through endosomes/lysosomes to reduce the accumulation and toxicity of intracellular α‐syn in neuronal cells overexpressing α‐syn. Our studies suggest that targeting the common structural conformation of amyloids may be a promising approach for developing new therapeutics for amyloidogenic diseases.     

Chemoenzymatic Synthesis of Nonasulfated Tetrahyaluronan with a Paramagnetic Tag for Studying Its Complex with Interleukin‐10

Implants and artificial biomaterials containing sulfated hyaluronans have been shown to improve the healing of injured skin and bones. It is hypothesized that these effects are mediated by the binding of sulfated glycosaminoglycans (GAGs) to growth factors and cytokines, resulting in the sequestering of proteins to the wound healing site and in modulated protein activity. Given that no direct synthetic access to sulfated oligohyaluronans has been available, little is known about their protein binding and the structure of the resulting protein complexes. Here, the chemoenzymatic preparation of oligohyaluronans on the gram scale is described. Oligohyaluronans are converted into anomeric azides at the reducing end, enabling the attachment of analytical labels through an anomeric ligation reaction. A nonasulfated tetrahyaluronan–ethylenediaminetetraacetic acid derivative has been produced and used as a paramagnetic tag for the elucidation of the complex of this ligand with interleukin‐10 using paramagnetic relaxation enhancement NMR analysis. The metal ion position is resolved with 1.0 Å, enabling a refined structural model of the complex.     

On the Majorana condition for nonlinear Dirac systems

For arbitrarily large initial data in an open set defined by an approximate Majorana condition, global existence and scattering results for solutions to the Dirac equation with Soler-type nonlinearity and the Dirac–Klein–Gordon system in critical spaces in spatial dimension three are established.     

Fourier multipliers on the real Hardy spaces

We provide a variant of Hytönen’s embedding theorem, which allows us to extend and unify several sufficient conditions for a function to be a Fourier multiplier on the real Hardy spaces.     

Bulk-Robust combinatorial optimization

Mathematical Programming - We commence an algorithmic study of Bulk-Robustness, a new model of robustness in combinatorial optimization. Unlike most existing models, Bulk-Robust combinatorial...