News tagged with beta amyloid

Amyloid beta (Aβ or Abeta) is a peptide of 39–43 amino acids that appear to be the main constituent of amyloid plaques in the brains of Alzheimer's disease patients. Similar plaques appear in some variants of Lewy body dementia and in inclusion body myositis, a muscle disease. Aβ also forms aggregates coating cerebral blood vessels in cerebral amyloid angiopathy. These plaques are composed of a tangle of regularly ordered fibrillar aggregates called amyloid fibers, a protein fold shared by other peptides such as prions associated with protein misfolding diseases. Research on laboratory rats suggest that the two-molecule, soluble form of the peptide is a causative agent in the development of Alzheimer's and that the two-molecule form is the smallest synaptotoxic species of soluble amyloid beta oligomer

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