PASADENA, Calif. – The Spanish explorer Ponce de Leon spent a fair amount of his time in 1513 looking for the fountain of youth. The upside was that he discovered Florida. The downside was that the fountain was a myth. Now in two separate awards from the Ellison Medical Foundation, two scientists from the California Institute of Technology are taking a much more scholarly approach to the ravages of aging. Harry Gray, a chemist, has been awarded $970,000 to reveal the structure of a protein and a peptide that underlie two age-related diseases, Alzheimer’s and Parkinson’s, while biologist Alexander Varshavsky has been awarded $972,000 to conduct a systematic investigation of the genetics and biochemistry of aging.
Gray, the Arnold O. Beckman Professor of Chemistry, notes that approximately one million Americans suffer from Parkinson’s, while 4.5 million have Alzheimer’s. In order to design a drug to combat these two diseases, a key step is to understand the critical structural differences between normal proteins and the malignant proteins that comprise these diseases.
Both Alzheimer’s and Parkinson’s are associated with the accumulation in the brain of aggregates of proteins known as fibrils. In Parkinson’s, the fibrils are composed of the protein alpha-synuclein, while in Alzheimer’s, the fibrils or plaques are composed of the AB amyloid peptide. Alpha-synuclein and AB amyloid peptide are known as “disordered biopolymers,” meaning that they do not have well-defined structures. Because of this lack of structure, the traditional tools used by chemists, such as x-ray crystallography and nuclear magnetic resonance spectroscopy, are virtually useless. They are only effective if the peptides and proteins being studied have well-defined structures in crystals or solutions.
