Alzheimer’s disease is a problem that many people face as they age, and it is related to an accelerated death of neuron cells in the brain. That is what most of us have already internalised as a fact:
Our Brain Cells Are Fragile Organisms. We Need To Protect Them As Appropriately As We Can.
Our brains contain approximately 86 billion neuron cells that are used in storing and processing information.
As these neurons are heavily involved in our cognitive processing of various types of sensory information, a patient with Alzheimer’s would find that their cognitive processing speeds decline, and they wouldn’t be as mentally sharp as they used to be.
One thing that is prevalent in Alzheimer’s patients are the amyloid beta aggregates that can be found in their brains.
I’m sure we can visualise the difference between a cooked and an uncooked chicken egg. A regular egg consists of approximately 12.5% protein and 76% water, hence it looks translucent and fluid when it is uncooked.
However, as we cook it, we drive away some of the water, and the proteins refold to achieve a more stable configuration, which forces it to aggregate and turn into a white opaque solid.
Much like how the electrical wires at home tend to have minds of their own and coil up into messy knots and aggregates over time — even when we just leave them there on their own.
Protein folding is a complex enough thing on its own, and there are many factors that contribute to its folding stability, such as:
Many factors affect the process of protein folding, including conformational and compositional stability, cellular environment including temperature and pH, primary and secondary structure, solvation, hydrogen bonding, salt bridges, hydrophobic effects, van der Waals (vdW) forces, ligand binding, cofactor binding, ion binding, chaperones and PTMs, to name just a few.
When we have amyloid beta aggregates accumulating in our brain, a few things are evident:
