Yeast Protein Reveals Clues to How Alzheimer’s Forms

Amyloids in the brain persist for decades. We just can’t get rid of them, yet yeast cells seem to have a mechanism for getting rid of them in 15 minutes,” says Luke Berchowitz, a postdoc at MIT’s Koch Institute for Integrative Cancer Research and the paper’s lead author. “If we can harness that mechanism, and really understand it, that could lead to anti-amyloid therapeutic opportunities.”

The paper’s senior author is Angelika Amon, the Kathleen and Curtis Marble Professor in Cancer Research and a member of the Koch Institute. Other authors are undergraduate Margaret Walker, postdocs Greg Kabachinski and Thomas Carlile, associate professor of biology Wendy Gilbert, and professor of biology Thomas Schwartz.

Reproductive role

Berchowitz and colleagues came across the yeast amyloid-forming protein known as Rim4 while investigating how sexual reproduction works in yeast. Rim4 is a protein containing long regions of disorder and stretches rich in the amino acid asparagine, which is a hallmark of a type of amyloid-forming proteins known as prions.