%0 Journal Article %J Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences of the United States of America %D 2001 %T Solid-state NMR studies of the secondary structure of a mutant prion protein fragment of 55 residues that induces neurodegeneration %A Laws, D. D. %A Bitter, H. M. L. %A Liu, K. %A Ball, H. L. %A Kaneko, K. %A Wille, H. %A Cohen, F. E. %A Prusiner, S. B. %A Pines, A. %A Wemmer, D. E. %K diseases %X

The secondary structure of a 55-residue fragment of the mouse prion protein, MoPrP(89-143), was studied in randomly aggregated (dried from water) and fibrillar (precipitated from water/ acetonitrile) forms by C-13 solid-state NMR. Recent studies have shown that the fibrillar form of the P101L mutant of MoPrP(89-143) is capable of inducing prion disease in transgenic mice, whereas unaggregated or randomly aggregated samples do not provoke disease. Through analysis of C-13 chemical shifts, we have determined that both wild-type and mutant sequence MoPrP(89-143) form a mixture of beta -sheet and alpha -helical conformations in the randomly aggregated state although the beta -sheet content in MoPrP(89-143, P101L) is significantly higher than in the wild-type peptide. In a fibrillar state, MoPrP(89-143, P101L) is completely converted into beta -sheet, suggesting that the formation of a specific beta -sheet structure may be required for the peptide to induce disease. Studies of an analogous peptide from Syrian hamster PrP verify that sequence alterations in residues 101-117 affect the conformation of aggregated forms of the peptides.

%B Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences of the United States of America %V 98 %P 11686-11690 %8 Sep 25 %@ 0027-8424 %G English %U ://WOS:000171237100125 %N 20 %M WOS:000171237100125 %! Solid-state NMR studies of the secondary structure of a mutant prion protein fragment of 55 residues that induces neurodegeneration %R Doi 10.1073/Pnas.201404298