αA 66−80 peptide forms with age in the lens nucleus of humans and guinea pigs, and binds to αAcrystallin by hydrophobic bonds to produce protein aggregates. The purpose of the present study was to use negative-stain transmission electron microscopy (TEM) to investigate peptide/crystallin structures that form when αA 66−80 peptide is incubated with recombinant human (HU) and guinea pig (GP) αA-crystallin, and GP αA ins -crystallin, under physiological conditions of temperature and pH. HU and GP αA-crystallin each consists of 173 amino acid residues with only eight differences. GP αA ins -crystallin contains an insertion of 23 amino acids into the sequence for normal GP αA-crystallin. Synthetic αA 66−80 peptide was incubated with each crystallin for 24 hrs in phosphate buffered saline at 37 o C, pH 7.4. Samples were loaded onto electron microscopy grids and analyzed by TEM. With GP αA-crystallin, the αA 66−80 peptide appeared to first form up to 700 nm long, independent peptide fibrils, which subsequently bound numerous αAcrystallin oligomers along the entire length of the fibril to form up to 30 nm thick peptide/oligomer fibril structures. In contrast, HU αA-crystallin somehow prevented independent αA 66−80 peptide fibrillation, and instead joined with the peptides to form amorphous aggregates and linear chains of αA oligomers. When incubated alone, GP αA ins -crystallin eventually lost all oligomeric
This article has been retracted at the request of the authors. The senior author contacted the journal in a forthright manner, in an effort to preserve the scientific integrity of the literature, after discovering a significant error in the results reported in the article. The authors were recently made aware of a paper by Kim et al. (Nature Commun. 2019) which shows a spirosome structure (the enzyme aldehyde-alcohol dehydrogenase) present in E. coli (Fig.
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