Nanoscale imaging of individual amyloid aggregates extracted from brains of Alzheimer and Parkinson patients reveals presence of lipids in α-synuclein but not in amyloid β

Abrupt aggregation of misfolded proteins is the underlying molecular cause of Alzheimer disease (AD) and Parkinson disease (PD). Both AD and PD are severe pathologies that affect millions of people around the world. A small 42 amino acid long peptide, known as amyloid β (Aβ), aggregates in the frontal cortex of AD patients forming oligomers and fibrils, highly toxic protein aggregates that cause progressive neuron death. Similar aggregates of α-synuclein (α-Syn), a small protein that facilitates neurotransmitter release, are observed in the midbrain, hypothalamus, and thalamus of people with PD. In this study, we utilized the innovative nano-Infrared imaging technique to investigate the structural organization of individual Aβ and α-syn fibrils postmortem extracted from brains of AD and PD patients, respectively. We observed two morphologically different Aβ and α-Syn fibril polymorphs in each patient's brain. One had twisted topology, whereas another exhibited flat tape-like morphology. We found that both polymorphs shared the same parallel β-sheet-dominated secondary structure. These findings suggested that both fibril polymorphs were built from structurally similar if not identical filaments that coiled forming twisted fibrils or associated side-by-side in the case of straight Aβ and α-Syn fibrils. Nano-Infrared analysis of individual protein aggregates also revealed the presence of lipids in the structure of both twisted and tape-like α-Syn fibrils that were not observed in any of the Aβ fibril polymorphs. These findings demonstrate that lipid membranes can play a critically important role in the onset and progression of PD.