Biological availability of aluminum in commercial ATP

Aluminum is a contaminant of commercial ATP. We have used the fluorescent chelation agent morin to define the conditions of solution pH and incubation period under which this contaminating aluminum was biologically available. The biological significance of our model ligand morin was tested in media in which the morin was replaced with the A beta P(25-35) peptide. Aluminum-contaminated ATP was shown to promote the formation of Thioflavin T-reactive amyloid aggregates relative to equimolar concentrations of either aluminum added in the absence of ATP or aluminum-free ATP. Our demonstration of the biological availability of aluminum in commercial ATP should serve as a cautionary note to its use in biochemistry, and might also be interpreted to invoke ATP as an intracellular (intraneuronal) pool of biologically available aluminum in vivo.