Recent Advances in the Study of Protein Misfolding Diseases

Protein misfolding diseases include highly debilitating degenerative disorders like Alzheimer’s and Parkinson’s diseases. The healthcare and financial burden linked to these pathologies has been steadily increasing over the past decade. Actually, there is currently no efficient treatment for misfolding diseases as well as no reliable early diagnostic techniques for them, in most cases. It is known that, in many cases, the cytotoxic effect of misfolded proteins is exerted through their self-assembly into amyloid-like protein aggregates. Unfortunately, the mechanisms responsible for the toxicity of protein aggregates are still not completely understood. The number of protein targets whose misfolding and aggregation is being shown to be associated with the onset of pathologic conditions is constantly increasing. Since the development of degenerative disorders is expected to increase at a similar rate than life expectancy, it is likely that in the years to come misfolding d iseases would become more common and prevalent than previously thought. We should be prepared to deal with such a dramatic scenario and join research efforts to understand the molecular mechanism that underlie these devastating disorders without further delay. In this book, we highlight recent advances in the study of protein misfolding disorders and their protein targets, but we also describe how different organisms exploit the amyloid fold for the functional and dynamic assembly of biological structures.Show MoreRelatedEssay On Protein Misfolding752 Words   |  4 PagesThe protein misfolding induces structural conversion of a soluble protein to insoluble amyloids through self-assembling. 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