Rapid detection of Aβ aggregation and inhibition by dual functions of gold nanoplasmic particles: Catalytic activator and optical reporter

One of the primary pathological hallmarks of Alzheimer's diseases (AD) is amyloid-β (Aβ) aggregation and its extracellular accumulation. However, current in vitro Aβ aggregation assays require time-consuming and labor-intensive steps, which delay the process of drug discovery and understanding the mechanism of Aβ induced neurotoxicity. Here, we propose a rapid detection method for studying Aβ aggregation and inhibition under an optimized acidic perturbation condition by dual functions of gold nanoplasmonic particles (GNPs): (1) catalytic activator and (2) optical reporter. Because of roles of GNPs as effective nucleation sites for fast-catalyzing Aβ aggregation and colorimetric optical reporters for tracking Aβ aggregation, we accomplished the fast aggregation assay in less than 1 min by the naked eyes. Our detection method is based on spontaneous clustering of unconjugated (unmodified) GNPs along with the aggregated Aβ network under an aggregation-promoting condition. As a proof-of-concept demonstration, we employed the acidic perturbation permitting rapid cooperative assemblies of GNPs and Aβ peptides via their surface charge modulation. Under the optimized acidic perturbation condition around pH 2 to 3, we characterized the concentration-dependent colorimetric responses for aggregation at physiologically relevant Aβ concentration levels (from 100 μM to 10 nM). We also demonstrated the GNP/acidic condition-based rapid inhibition assay of Aβ aggregation by using well-known binding reagents such as antibody and serum albumin. The proposed methodology can be a powerful alternative method for screening drugs for AD as well as studying molecular biophysics of protein aggregations, and further extended to explore other protein conformational diseases such as neurodegenerative disease.