Hi all,
One more note on this project. We've finished a first pass analysis on the data we collected for p18202 and have written a paper detailing this analysis and findings. While this paper is still in peer review for official publication, we've made the paper available via the biology preprinting server, Biorxiv. You may find the paper here:
https://www.biorxiv.org/content/10.1101 ... 2.478828v1. (or search Biorxiv Apolipoprotein E4 has extensive conformational heterogeneity in lipid free and bound forms).
Here are the highlights-
This project highlights the strongest genetic risk factor for Alzheimer's disease, ApoE. People with two copies of ApoE4 are ~12-15x more likely to develop Alzheimer's disease than people who have the more common variant, ApoE3. Our hope is that by understanding how ApoE isoforms adopt different conformations, and how those conformations lead to disease, we may be able to develop drugs that change or fix the conformations of bad-acting ApoE variants. While ApoE has been studied for many years, "seeing" ApoE has had a lot of challenges. For the first time, we present ApoE in atomistic detail. We find several interesting findings, including that parts of ApoE are highly dynamic, an underappreciated fact before now. We also find that many other parts of the protein adopt not one, but several stable conformations. We will continue to explore other ApoE variants (p18201 for GPU, 18210 for CPU), as well as explore this dataset in much more depth in future work.
A huge thank you to everyone who has contributed their time and energy to this project.