Hormones stored in structures usually thought toxic

Dispersed in the brains of Alzheimer’s patients are disk-shaped lesions, about 100 µm across. Whether those lesions, or plaques, are a cause or a consequence of Alzheimer’s disease is controversial, but their composition is clear. The plaques are made from fibrous aggregates--amyloid--of protein or their shorter cousins, peptides. Once sequestered in amyloid, a protein or a peptide can no longer perform its function. Even if amyloid does not directly cause Alzheimer’s and other diseases, it seems at best a useless, dead-end repository of proteinaceous material. But as a new paper exemplifies, a less malign view of amyloid is emerging. Roland Riek of ETH Zürich and his collaborators have demonstrated that our bodies exploit amyloid as a temporary storage medium for a wide range of peptide hormones. Riek suspected a hormone--amyloid connection when he found that a stress hormone formed amyloid fibrils. He and his collaborators then subjected 41 other peptide hormones to a battery of biochemical, biophysical, and crystallographic tests. The finding: 75% of the peptide hormones form amyloid; and, as befits a storage medium, the amyloid can also disaggregate to release the peptides. In a final test, the team stained slices of mouse brain with hormone-sensitive and amyloid-sensitive dyes. The stained regions coincided. Riek’s discovery adds to the modest but growing list of examples of so-called functional amyloid that perform useful tasks in living organisms. Evidently, amyloid is not always pernicious. (S. K. Maji et al., Science 325, 328, 2009 .)--Charles Day