Abstract
Kinetic measurements of amyloid growth provide insight into the free energy landscape of this supramolecular process and are crucial in the search for potent inhibitors of the main disorders with which it is associated, including Alzheimer’s and Parkinson’s diseases and Type II diabetes. In recent years, a new class of surface-bound biosensor assays, e.g., those based on surface plasmon resonance (SPR) and the quartz crystal microbalance (QCM) have been established as extremely valuable tools for kinetic measurements of amyloid formation. Here we describe detailed protocols of how QCM techniques can be used to monitor the elongation of amyloid fibrils in real time and to study the influence of external factors on the kinetics of amyloid growth with unprecedented accuracy.
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Acknowledgments
We thank Duncan A. White and Evgenia G. Afanasieva for helpful comments on the manuscript. The authors acknowledge support from the EPSRC, the BBSRC, the Wellcome and Leverhulme Trusts, and the IRC in Nanotechnology. AKB acknowledges support through a Bye-Fellowship from Magdalene College, Cambridge.
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Buell, A.K., Dobson, C.M., Welland, M.E. (2012). Measuring the Kinetics of Amyloid Fibril Elongation Using Quartz Crystal Microbalances. In: Sigurdsson, E., Calero, M., Gasset, M. (eds) Amyloid Proteins. Methods in Molecular Biology, vol 849. Humana Press. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-1-61779-551-0_8
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DOI: https://doi.org/10.1007/978-1-61779-551-0_8
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