Overcoming the challenges of peptide simulations

A new paper marks a step forward in our understanding of peptide fragments and methods for simulating them.

Researchers from the Astbury Centre for Structural Molecular Biology and School of Chemistry have, for the first time, calculated the solubility diagram of amyloid β (16-22) peptide – a peptide fragment related to the onset of Alzheimer's disease. Their study sheds new light on how the solubility of various peptide aggregates depends on experimental conditions.

This is a significant objective given that self-assembled peptide aggregates play a key role in the onset of diseases such as Alzheimer’s and Parkinson's. Understanding the solubility of peptide aggregates is also crucial in biomaterials research as they can be useful, for example, as scaffolds for tissue engineering applications. Read more.