Instrumentation of high-throughput Raman optical activity spectrometer and structural anaylysis of naturing amyloid fibril

2016 Fiscal Year Final Research Report

• Project/Area Number: 26708017
• Research Category: Grant-in-Aid for Young Scientists (A)
• Allocation Type: Partial Multi-year Fund
• Research Field: Analytical chemistry
• Research Institution: Osaka University
• Principal Investigator: Yamamoto Shigeki 大阪大学, 理学(系)研究科(研究院), 助教 (60552784)
• Research Collaborator: OZAKI Yukihiro ; BOUŘ Petr ; TSUKAHARA Satoshi
• Project Period (FY): 2014-04-01 – 2017-03-31
• Keywords: アミロイド / 二次構造 / 振動光学活性 / 分子断片化法 / インスリン / ラマン光学活性

Outline of Final Research Achievements

Raman Optical Activity (ROA) is a vibrational spectroscopy sensitive to molecular conformation in solutions, which can be a new analytical method for protein structures in solution phase. However, there has been tasks to solve in ROA, a lack of standard way of interpretation of amyloid fibril proteins and a low sensitivity of the instrument. We targeted on a protein insulin as a good model of amyloid fibril-forming proteins and analyzed its second- and higher-order proteins structures of the amyloid. On the basis of comparisons of experimental and calculated ROA spectra, we could determine the stable insulin structure in the fibril as beta-roll structure, not beta-helical one. The calculation was done by combining molecular dynamics simulation and quantum mechanical simulation of the spectra aided with a fragment method. We developed a new ROA instrument with multi-lens setup which brings 10-times stronger Raman signal compared to conventional back-scattered one.

Free Research Field

分光分析