American Chemical Society, Journal of Physical Chemistry B (Soft Condensed Matter and Biophysical Chemistry), 3(117), p. 784-788, 2013
DOI: 10.1021/jp309528f
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Amyloid fibrils are proteins misfolding structures that involve a beta-sheet structure and are associated with the pathologies of various neurodegenerative diseases. Here we show that Thioflavine-T and Congo Red, two major dyes used to image fibrils by fluorescence assays, can provide deep structural information when probed by means of polarization resolved fluorescence microscopy. Unlike fluorescence anisotropy or fluorescence detected linear dichroism imaging, this technique allows to retrieve simultaneously both mean orientation and orientation dispersion of the dye, used here as a reporter of the fibril structure. We have observed that insulin amyloid fibrils exhibit a homogenous behavior over the fibrils' length, confirming their structural uniformity. In addition, these results reveal the existence of various structures among the observed fibrils' population, in spite of a similar aspect when imaged with conventional fluorescence microscopy. This optical non-destructive technique opens perspectives for in-vivo structural analyses or high throughput screening.