Fluorescent Probes and Protein Misfolding: Methods and Applications
Popular Abstract in English Proteins are smart molecules. They act in a vast variety of roles, for instance as transporters, messengers, catalysts, warriors and scaffolds. The ability of a specific protein to perform a task is closely related to its three-dimensional shape (native fold). However, not all proteins encoded in human genome have a structure; some of them are devoid of a well-defined sProtein misfolding is a frequently occurring event in living cells and without the quality control, the consequences are disasterous. In this thesis, we studied protein misfolding in vitro by employing a variety of fluorophores, to either detect the highly ordered aggregates of intrinsically disordered proteins/peptides or slight misfolding of a natively folded protein. Misfolding and concurrent
