Pretreatment of chemically-synthesized Aβ42 affects its biological activity in yeast

Abstract

The tendency of amyloid β (Aβ42) peptide to misfold and aggregate into insoluble amyloid fibrils in Alzheimer's disease (AD) has been well documented. Accumulation of Aβ42 fibrils has been correlated with abnormal apoptosis and unscheduled cell division which can also trigger the death of neuronal cells, while oligomers can also exhibit similar activities. While investigations using chemically-synthesized Aβ42 peptide have become common practice, there appear to be differences in outcomes from different preparations. In order to resolve this inconsistency, we report 2 separate methods of preparing chemically-synthesized Aβ42 and we examined their effects in yeast. Hexafluoroisopropanol pretreatment caused toxicity while, ammonium hydroxide treated Aβ42 induced cell proliferation in both C. glabrata and S. cerevisiae. The hexafluoroisopropanol prepared Aβ42 had greater tendency to form amyloid on yeast cells as determined by thioflavin T staining followed by flow cytometry and microscopy. Both quiescent and non-quiescent cells were analyzed by these methods of peptide preparation. Non-quiescent cells were susceptible to the toxicity of Aβ42 compared with quiescent cells (p < 0.005). These data explain the discrepancy in the previous publications about the effects of chemically-synthesized Aβ42 on yeast cells. The effect of Aβ42 on yeast cells was independent of the size of the peptide aggregates. However, the Aβ42 pretreatment determined whether the molecular conformation of peptide resulted in proliferation or toxicity in yeast based assays.