Social and Behavioral Sciences Commons^™

The Extracellular Chaperone Clusterin Potently Inhibits Human Lysozyme Amyloid Formation By Interacting With Prefibrillar Species, Mark Wilson, Justin Yerbury, Stephen Poon, Christopher Dobson, C V Robinson, Elise Stewart, Janet Kumita, Mireille Dumoulin, Gemma Caddy, Christine Hagan

Mark R Wilson

We have studied the effects of the extracellular molecular chaperone, clusterin, on the in vitro aggregation of mutational variants of human lysozyme, including one associated with familial amyloid disease. The aggregation of the amyloidogenic variant I56T is inhibited significantly at clusterin-to-lysozyme ratios as low as 1:80 (i.e. one clusterin molecule per 80 lysozyme molecules). Experiments indicate that under the conditions where inhibition of aggregation occurs, clusterin does not bind detectably to the native or fibrillar states, or to the monomeric transient intermediate known to be a key species in the aggregation reaction. Rather, it seems to interact with oligomeric species …