UMD Theses and Dissertations

Permanent URI for this collectionhttp://hdl.handle.net/1903/3

New submissions to the thesis/dissertation collections are added automatically as they are received from the Graduate School. Currently, the Graduate School deposits all theses and dissertations from a given semester after the official graduation date. This means that there may be up to a 4 month delay in the appearance of a given thesis/dissertation in DRUM.

More information is available at Theses and Dissertations at University of Maryland Libraries.

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Author: search.filters.author.Varongchayakul, NitinunSubject: search.filters.subject.Mechanical

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    Direct Observation of Amyloid Nucleation under Nanomechanical Stretching
    (2013) Varongchayakul, Nitinun; Seog, Joonil; Material Science and Engineering; Digital Repository at the University of Maryland; University of Maryland (College Park, Md.)
    Self-assembly of amyloid nanofiber is associated with functional and pathological processes such as in neurodegenerative diseases. Despite intensive studies, stochastic nature of the process has made it difficult to elucidate molecular mechanisms for the key amyloid nucleation. Here, we investigated the amyloid nucleation of silk-elastin-like peptide (SELP) using time-lapse lateral force microscopy (LFM). By repeated scanning a single line on a SELP-coated mica surface, we observed sudden stepwise height increases, corresponds to nucleation of an amyloid fiber. The lateral force profiles followed either a worm-like chain model or an exponential function, suggesting that the atomic force microscopy (AFM) tip stretches a single or multiple SELP molecules along the scanning direction, serves as the template for further self-assembly perpendicular to the scan direction. Such mechanically induced nucleation of amyloid fibrils allows positional and directional control of amyloid assembly in vitro, which we demonstrate by generating single nanofibers at predetermined nucleation sites.