Cryo-EM structure of alpha-synuclein fibrils
Abstract
Parkinson's disease is a progressive neuropathological disorder that belongs to the class of synucleopathies, in which the protein alpha-synuclein is found at abnormally high concentrations in affected neurons. Its hallmark are intracellular inclusions called Lewy bodies and Lewy neurites. We here report the structure of cytotoxic alpha-synuclein fibrils (residues 1-121), determined by cryo-electron microscopy structure at a resolution of 3.4Å. Two protofilaments form a polar fibril composed of staggered β-strands. The backbone of residues 38 to 95, including the fibril core and the non-amyloid component region, are well resolved in the EM map. Residues 50-57, containing three of the mutation sites associated with familial synucleinopathies, form the interface between the two protofilaments and contribute to fibril stability. A hydrophobic cleft at one end of the fibril may have implications for fibril elongation, and invites for the design of molecules for diagnosis and treatment of synucleinopathies.
Data availability
The cryo-EM image data are available in the Electron Microscopy Public Image Archive, entry number EMPIAR-10195. The 3D map is available in the EMDB, entry number EMD-4276. The atomic coordinates are available at the PDB, entry number PDB 6FLT.
-
Structure of alpha-synuclein fibrilsPublicly available at the RCSB Protein Data Bank (accession no. 6FLT).
-
Structure of alpha-synuclein fibrilsPublicly available at the Electron Microscopy Data Bank (accession no. EMD-4276).
-
Structure of alpha-synuclein fibrilsPublicly available at the Electron Microscopy Public Image Archive (accession no. EMPIAR-10195).
Article and author information
Author details
Funding
Swiss National Science Foundation (CRSII3_154461 and CRSII5_177195)
- Ricardo Guerrero-Ferreira
- Nicholas M I Taylor
Synapsis Foundation Switzerland
- Henning Stahlberg
The funders had no role in study design, data collection and interpretation, or the decision to submit the work for publication.
Reviewing Editor
- Sjors HW Scheres, MRC Laboratory of Molecular Biology, United Kingdom
Version history
- Received: March 5, 2018
- Accepted: July 1, 2018
- Accepted Manuscript published: July 3, 2018 (version 1)
- Version of Record published: August 14, 2018 (version 2)
Copyright
© 2018, Guerrero-Ferreira et al.
This article is distributed under the terms of the Creative Commons Attribution License permitting unrestricted use and redistribution provided that the original author and source are credited.
Metrics
-
- 20,548
- views
-
- 3,155
- downloads
-
- 432
- citations
Views, downloads and citations are aggregated across all versions of this paper published by eLife.
Download links
Downloads (link to download the article as PDF)
Open citations (links to open the citations from this article in various online reference manager services)
Cite this article (links to download the citations from this article in formats compatible with various reference manager tools)
Further reading
-
- Neuroscience
Improving our understanding of autism, ADHD, dyslexia and other neurodevelopmental conditions requires collaborations between genetics, psychiatry, the social sciences and other fields of research.
-
- Genetics and Genomics
- Neuroscience
Genome-wide association studies have revealed >270 loci associated with schizophrenia risk, yet these genetic factors do not seem to be sufficient to fully explain the molecular determinants behind this psychiatric condition. Epigenetic marks such as post-translational histone modifications remain largely plastic during development and adulthood, allowing a dynamic impact of environmental factors, including antipsychotic medications, on access to genes and regulatory elements. However, few studies so far have profiled cell-specific genome-wide histone modifications in postmortem brain samples from schizophrenia subjects, or the effect of antipsychotic treatment on such epigenetic marks. Here, we conducted ChIP-seq analyses focusing on histone marks indicative of active enhancers (H3K27ac) and active promoters (H3K4me3), alongside RNA-seq, using frontal cortex samples from antipsychotic-free (AF) and antipsychotic-treated (AT) individuals with schizophrenia, as well as individually matched controls (n=58). Schizophrenia subjects exhibited thousands of neuronal and non-neuronal epigenetic differences at regions that included several susceptibility genetic loci, such as NRG1, DISC1, and DRD3. By analyzing the AF and AT cohorts separately, we identified schizophrenia-associated alterations in specific transcription factors, their regulatees, and epigenomic and transcriptomic features that were reversed by antipsychotic treatment; as well as those that represented a consequence of antipsychotic medication rather than a hallmark of schizophrenia in postmortem human brain samples. Notably, we also found that the effect of age on epigenomic landscapes was more pronounced in frontal cortex of AT-schizophrenics, as compared to AF-schizophrenics and controls. Together, these data provide important evidence of epigenetic alterations in the frontal cortex of individuals with schizophrenia, and remark for the first time on the impact of age and antipsychotic treatment on chromatin organization.