- Warsaw-4-PhD School
- Doctoral studies
Paper of the Week! Top 2% from over 6000 manuscripts
A prestigious Journal of Biological Chemistry has selected the manuscript: BC/2014/608844 “Highly amyloidogenic two-chain peptide fragments are released upon partial digestion of insulin with pepsin” of our colleague Prof. Wojtek Dzwolak and his group as a JBC “Paper of the Week”.
Bovine insulin molecule (in the dimeric state) with the highly misfolding-prone region highlighted in red (according to the JBC Dzwolak’s study).
The paper describes “explosive” fibrillation of insulin in the presence of traces of pepsin. This behavior is reminiscent of the poorly understood in vivo tendencies of many proteins to misfold and aggregate into so-called amyloid fibrils, the phenomenon linked to – among others – Alzheimer’s and Parkinson’s diseases. Wojtek Dzwolak and colleagues have shown that when the enzyme cuts open the main topological loop of insulin molecule a significant amyloidogenic potential becomes “unleashed”. By helping us understand complex physicochemical processes underlying neurodegenerative maladies these findings facilitate development of new effective therapeutic approaches.