Towards high throughput oligomer detection and classification for early-stage aggregation of amyloidogenic protein
File(s)Tahirbegi etal_revised_Supplementary Material.pdf (366.05 KB) fchem-10-967882.pdf (2.29 MB)
Supporting information
Published version
Author(s)
Type
Journal Article
Abstract
Aggregation kinetics of proteins and peptides have been studied extensively due to their significance in many human diseases, including neurodegenerative disorders, and the roles they play in some key physiological processes. However, most of these studies have been performed as bulk measurements using Thioflavin T or other fluorescence turn-on reagents as indicators of fibrillization. Such techniques are highly successful in making inferences about the nucleation and growth mechanism of fibrils, yet cannot directly measure assembly reactions at low protein concentrations which is the case for amyloid-β (Aβ) peptide under physiological conditions. In particular, the evolution from monomer to low-order oligomer in early stages of aggregation cannot be detected. Single-molecule methods allow direct access to such fundamental information. We developed a high-throughput protocol for single-molecule photobleaching experiments using an automated fluorescence microscope. Stepwise photobleaching analysis of the time profiles of individual foci allowed us to determine stoichiometry of protein oligomers and probe protein aggregation kinetics. Furthermore, we investigated the potential application of supervised machine learning with support vector machines (SVMs) as well as multilayer perceptron (MLP) artificial neural networks to classify bleaching traces into stoichiometric categories based on an ensemble of measurable quantities derivable from individual traces. Both SVM and MLP models achieved a comparable accuracy of more than 80% against simulated traces up to 19-mer, although MLP offered considerable speed advantages, thus making it suitable for application to high-throughput experimental data. We used our high-throughput method to study the aggregation of Aβ40 in the presence of metal ions and the aggregation of α-synuclein in the presence of gold nanoparticles.
Date Issued
2022-08-30
Date Acceptance
2022-07-28
Citation
Frontiers in Chemistry, 2022, 10
ISSN
2296-2646
Publisher
Frontiers Media
Journal / Book Title
Frontiers in Chemistry
Volume
10
Copyright Statement
© 2022 Tahirbegi, Magness, Piersimoni, Teng, Hooper, Guo, Knöpfel, Willison, Klug and Ying. This is an open-access article distributed under the terms of the Creative Commons Attribution License (CC BY). The use, distribution or reproduction in other forums is permitted, provided the original author(s) and the copyright owner(s) are credited and that the original publication in this journal is cited, in accordance with accepted academic practice. No use, distribution or reproduction is permitted which does not comply with these terms.
Sponsor
The Leverhulme Trust
Grant Number
RPG-2015-345
Subjects
Science & Technology
Physical Sciences
Chemistry, Multidisciplinary
Chemistry
single-molecule photobleaching
fluorescence imaging
machine learning
artificial neural network
amyloid-beta
alpha-synuclein
protein aggregation
neurodegenerative disease
ALPHA-SYNUCLEIN
A-BETA
ALZHEIMERS-DISEASE
SINGLE-MOLECULE
OXIDATIVE STRESS
KINETIC-ANALYSIS
DC-SIGN
STOICHIOMETRY
MECHANISM
TOXICITY
amyloid-β
artificial neural network
fluorescence imaging
machine learning
neurodegenerative disease
protein aggregation
single-molecule photobleaching
α-synuclein
Publication Status
Published
Article Number
ARTN 967882