Monte Carlo Studies of Protein Aggregation

The disease-linked amyloid β (Aβ) and α-synuclein (αS) proteins are both fibril-forming and natively unfolded in free monomeric form. Here, we discuss two recent studies, where we used extensive implicit solvent all-atom Monte Carlo (MC) simulations to elucidate the conformational ensembles sampled by these proteins. For αS, we somewhat unexpectedly observed two distinct phases, separated by a clear free-energy barrier. The presence of the barrier makes αS, with 140 residues, a challenge to simulate. By using a two-step simulation procedure based on flat-histogram techniques, it was possible to alleviate this problem. The barrier may in part explain why fibril formation is much slower for αS than it is for Aβ