De novo design of a two-stranded coiled-coil switch peptide

The properties and characteristics shared by amyloid fibrils formed from disease and non-disease associated proteins that are unrelated in sequence and structure offer the prospect that model systems can be used to systematically assess the factors that predispose a native protein to form amyloid fibrils. Based on a de novo design approach, we recently reported a unique switch peptide model system, cc beta, that forms a three-stranded coiled-coil structure at low temperatures and which can be easily converted to amyloid fibrils by increasing the temperature. To simplify the system further, we describe here the redesign of a two-stranded cc beta coiled-coil variant and its detailed analysis by a variety of biophysical methods. Compared with the original design, the characteristics of the peptide make it even simpler to elucidate and validate fundamental principles of amyloid fibril-formation. (c) 2006 Elsevier Inc. All rights reserved.