Unveiling the Role of Surfactants on Amyloid-Like Protein Self-Assembling

Abstract

Some proteins can undergo structural changes that may trigger an aggregation process where they self-assembly into highly ordered aggregates called amyloid fibers. In vivo, these amyloid fibers are related to more than 25 different diseases, some of them are lethal as Creutzfeldt-Jakob disease and others can lead a person to incapacities, as diabetes type II, Alzheimer's and Parkinson's diseases. With the aim of understanding the conditions and mechanisms by which proteins form amyloid fibers, we mixed bovine serum albumin (BSA) at pH 3.7 with sodium dodecyl sulfate (SDS) and sodium perfluorooctanoate (SPFO) to induce the amyloid fibers formation.