Sharif Digital Repository

Alzheimer’s disease (AD) is the most common type of dementia in the elderly. The neuropathology and treatment of AD is not precisely determined yet, but according to the pathological studies, AD is associated with presence of toxic soluble oligomers and insoluble senile plaques formed by amyloidosis of Amyloid Beta (Aβ) in neocortical region of brain. An attractive therapeutic approach to treat AD is to identify small ligands that are capable of binding to critical residues in order to inhibit or reverse Aβ amyloidosis process as source of neurotoxicity. In this area, therapeutic efforts designed various organic agents and most of them focused on the N-terminal sequence of Aβ. The aim of... 

Nowdays, it has been shown that protein misfolding is involved in more than forty diseases including Alzheimer’s and Parkinson’s. Alzheimer’s disease is one of the most common neurodegenerative diseases that disrupts brain function. The main cause of this illness is due to formation of extracellular amyloid plaque from a 42-amino acid-peptide called amyloid beta. Amyloidosis is caused by missfolding of peptides and proteins mainly because of physical and chemical changes in biomolecule or their environment.
Therefore, in this dissertation, using synthetic and recombinant abeta peptide, kinetic of amyloidosis was examined. Ultrasmall peptides (three-amino acid), containing branched chain... 

Bioorthogonal chemistry defines any reaction, inside or outside the living systems, without interfering with native chemical processes and 3dimensional structure of proteins. In these types of reactions water is the sole solvent; a neutral pH is required; the temperature must be up to 40 oC. The kinetics of reactions must be on the hour scale and the nontoxic reagents with low concentration must be used. One of the simplest methods of visualizing protein molecule is covalent attachment of fluorescein to protein. In this work several fluorescent compounds were synthesized. These novel compounds include acylchloride fluorescein, N-hydroxysuccinimide fluorescein, thiophenol fluorescein, and... 

Many experimental and theoretical studies have suggested that zinc binding to Aβ could promote amyloid-β aggregation and reactive oxygen species (ROS) production induced by AD disease. Therefore, the introduction of multifunctional drugs capable of chelating zinc metal ion and inhibiting Aβ aggregation is a promising strategy in the development of AD treatment. In present study molecular docking and molecular dynamics (MD) simulations were used to evaluate the efficacy of two new bifunctional peptide drug, composed of two different domains: C-terminal hydrophobic region of Aβ and Zn2+ chelator region. To evaluate the multifunctionality of the ligands, a comprehensive set of MD simulations up...