Associate Professor Meytal Landau, Department of Biology, Technion-Israel Institute of Technology, Israel

Functional Protein Fibrils in Infectious and Aggregation Diseases 

Protein fibrils that perform physiological activities, such as functional amyloids, could provide new therapeutic venues, mostly due to their roles as key virulence determinants in microbes, antimicrobial activities, and possible involvement in systemic and neurodegenerative diseases. Yet, these fibrous proteins present great challenges in structural and functional studies due to their aggregative and partially disordered nature, and structural polymorphisms observed in similar and even identical sequences.

Using X-ray micro-crystallography, we determined the first high resolution structures of bacterial amyloids involved in cytotoxicity, antibacterial activity and biofilm structuring (Tayeb-Fligelman et. al., Science 2017, Salinas et. al., Nat Commun 2018, Perov et al., PLoS Pathogens, 2019, and Tayeb-Fligelman et. al., Structure, in press). The structures revealed both resemblances and unexpected departures from the structures of pathological human amyloids, in correlation with their different activities. The similar structures of biofilm-associated and human pathological amyloidogenic regions imply on possible inter-species interactions that could have bearing on amyloid diseases by the creation of transmissible agents.

Furthermore, we offer atomic-resolution insight into three fibril-forming antimicrobial peptides, which featured unique morphologies, including a novel type of protein fibril composed of four-helical bundles that assemble into a tubular, elongated, structure (yet unpublished). We expect that a detailed molecular understanding of functional fibrils will provide the foundation for antimicrobial translational research and for elucidation of the etiology of and interactions between microbial and human ‘amylomes’ in health and disease.

Host: Professor Daniel Otzen, iNANO & Dept. of Molecular Biology and Genetics, AU

Coffee, tea, and bread will be served from 10:00 am in front of the auditorium.