Formation of Cross-Beta Supersecondary Structure by Soft-Amyloid Cores: Strategies for Their Prediction and Characterization

© 2019, Springer Science+Business Media, LLC, part of Springer Nature. Proteins with prion-like behavior are attracting an increasing interest, since accumulating evidences indicate that they play relevant roles both in health and disease. The self-assembly of these proteins into insoluble aggregates is associated with severe neuropathological processes such as amyotrophic lateral sclerosis (ALS). However, in normal conditions, they are known to accomplish a wide range of functional roles. The conformational duality of prion-like proteins is often encoded in specific protein regions, named prion-like domains (PrLDs). PrLDs are usually long and disordered regions of low complexity. We have shown that PrLDs might contain soft-amyloid cores that contribute significantly to trigger their aggregation, as well as to support their propagation. Further exploration of the role of these sequences in the conformational conversion of prion-like proteins might provide novel insights into the mechanism of action and regulation of these polypeptides, enabling the future development of therapeutic strategies. Here, we describe a set of methodologies aimed to identify and characterize these short amyloid stretches in a protein or proteome of interest, ranging from in silico detection to in vitro and in vivo evaluation and validation.