Alzheimer's Protein Is Likely Held Together With Many Weak Chemical Interactions

The chemical interactions that give proteins their shape may be weaker and more numerous than previously recognized, according to chemists at the University of Tokyo whose work was reported on by Medical Xpress . These weak connections provide a new way for such researchers to understand proteins that cause disease. The University of Tokyo team modeled the building blocks of the protein structure that causes Alzheimer's disease, amyloid beta sheets. Their research showed that some atoms too far apart to bond remained in each other's "electron neighborhoods." Professor Tomohiko Ohwada remarked, "This is so strange. It's outside the common sense of organic chemistry." The traditional understanding of chemical bonds has been that atoms must be side by side to share electrons in large molecules. Ohwada's research team calculated that atoms located far apart do not share electrons. However, their electron clouds can still influence each other "through-space bond path interactions" that are common enough to add up to a potentially significant influence on the overall structure of large molecules. "We studied the amyloid beta structure because everyone knows it can cause disease, but nobody really knows how the problematic structure develops," Ohwada concluded.