Discover and read the best of Twitter Threads about #PhaseSeparation
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Hot Rod Lincoln ~ Phase Separation
Spontaneous Nucleation and Fast Aggregate-Dependent Proliferation of a-Synuclein
Spontaneous Nucleation and Fast Aggregate-Dependent Proliferation of a-Synuclein
Typical blood pH is 7.35 - 7.45
Phase separation and neurodegeneration
Here’s a bit of a dive into some interesting recent work on #PhaseSeparation in cells - focusing on the role of ATP as a protein stabilizer in cells, independent of its energy-providing function. It all starts with a paper in @ScienceMagazine from 2017, science.sciencemag.org/content/356/63….
This Science paper showed that in vitro, ATP had hydrotope activity - the ability to solubilize proteins, and dissolve protein aggregates or liquid phase droplets. This function occurred at millimolar concentrations of ATP, near normal cellular levels.
There was some pretty quick push-back against the interpretation about any cellular role - pubpeer.com/publications/8…. One major point of criticism is that even at 5 mM ATP, there’s only about 1 ATP molecule per protein in a cell. So it’s hard to imagine proteome-scale activity.
