Martin Gruebele led a team that developed a way to watch how unfolded proteins move through a cell using a fluorescent microscope and three-dimensional diffusion modeling.
CHAMPAIGN, Ill. When a large protein unfolds in transit through a cell, it slows down and can get stuck in traffic. Using a specialized microscope - a sort of cellular traffic camera - University of Illinois chemists now can watch the way the unfolded protein diffuses. Studying the relationship between protein folding and transport could provide great insight into protein-misfolding diseases such as Alzheimer's and Huntington's. Chemistry professor Martin Gruebele and graduate students Minghao Guo and Hannah Gelman published their findings in the journal PLOS ONE. "We're looking at the earliest stages of disease, the initial phases of transport of bad proteins," Gruebele said. In the past, he said, much research on Alzheimer's and similar disease focused on fibrils, large bundles of misfolded proteins that form in the brain.
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