One of the grand challenges of biophysical chemistry is to understand the principles that govern protein misfolding and aggregation, which is a highly complex process that is sensitive to initial conditions, operates on a huge range of length- and timescales, and has products that range from protein dimers to macroscopic amyloid fibrils. Aberrant aggregation is associated with more than 25 diseases, which include Alzheimer's, Parkinson's, Huntington's, and type II diabetes. Amyloid aggregation has been extensively studied in the test tube, therefore under conditions that are far from physiological relevance. Hence, there is dire need to extend these investigations to in vivo conditions where amyloid formation is affected by a myriad of biochemical interactions. As a hallmark of neurodegenerative diseases, these interactions need to be understood in detail to develop novel therapeutic interventions, as millions of people globally suffer from neurodegenerative disorders and type II diabetes. The aim of this review is to document the progress in the research on amyloid formation from a physicochemical perspective with a special focus on the physiological factors influencing the aggregation of the amyloid-β peptide, the islet amyloid polypeptide, α-synuclein, and the hungingtin protein.

Significance: The aggregation of the amyloid-βpeptide (Aβ) into neurotoxic oligomers is central to the development of Alzheimer’s disease. One possible source of their toxicity results from interactions of the Aβoligomers with the neuronal membrane, damaging membrane integrity and thus neurons. However, molecular details of these interactions are unclear. Here, we contrast the dimerization of Aβin solution and at the neuronal membrane. Our results clearly indicate that the sugar moieties of GM1 sequester Aβby forming key hydrogen bonds with the peptide, which diverts the configuration of the Aβdimers away from damagingβ-sheet–rich structures. These findings underline the importance of GM1 in Alzheimer’s disease progression and provide a nanoscopic basis for its reported neuroprotective effect.

The CH₃ + HO₂ reaction system was studied theoretically by a newly developed, HEAT345-(Q) method based CHEAT1 protocol and includes the combined singlet and triplet potential energy surfaces. The main simplification is based on the CCSDT(Q)/cc-pVDZ calculation which is computationally inexpensive. Despite the economic and black-box treatment of higher excitations, the results are within 0.6 kcal/mol of the highly accurate literature values. Furthermore, the CHEAT1 surpassed the popular standard composite methods such as CBS-4M, CBS-QB3, CBS-APNO, G2, G3, G3MP2B3, G4, W1U, and W1BD mainly due to their poor performance in characterizing transition states (TS). For TS structures, various standard DFT and MP2 method have also been tested against the resulting CCSD/cc-pVTZ geometry of our protocol. A fairly good agreement was only found in the cases of the B2PLYP and BHandHLYP functionals, which were able to reproduce the structures of all TS studied within a maximum absolute deviation of 7%. The complex reaction mechanism was extended by three new low lying reaction channels. These are indirect water elimination from CH₃OOH resulted formaldehyde, H₂ elimination yielded methylene peroxide, and methanol and reactive triplet oxygen were formed via H-shift in the third channel. CHEAT1 protocol based on HEAT345-(Q) method is a robust, general, and cheap alternative for high accurate kinetic calculations.

A tremendous number of solvents, either as liquids or vapors, contaminate the environment on a daily basis worldwide. Olefin metathesis, which has been widely used as high-yielding protocols for ring-opening metathesis polymerization (ROMP), ring-closing metathesis (RCM), and isomerization reactions, is typically performed in toxic and volatile solvents such as dichloromethane. In this study, the results of our systematic experiments with the Grubbs G1, G2, and Hoveyda-Grubbs HG2 catalysts proved that benzotrifluoride (BTF) can replace dichloromethane (DCM) in these reactions, providing high yields and similar or even higher reaction rates in certain cases. The ROMP of norbornene resulted not only in high yields but also in polynorbornenes with a high molecular weight at low catalyst loadings. Ring-closing metathesis (RCM) experiments proved that, with the exception of the G1 catalyst, RCM occurs with similar high efficiencies in BTF as in DCM. It was found that isomerization of (Z)-but-2-ene-1,4-diyl diacetate with the G2 and HG2 catalysts proceeds at significantly higher initial rates in BTF than in DCM, leading to rapid isomerization with high yields in a short time. Overall, BTF is a suitable solvent for olefin metathesis, such as polymer syntheses by ROMP and the ring-closing and isomerization reactions.