Bayesian Extraction of Deep UV Resonance Raman Signature of Fibrillar Cross-β Sheet Core based on H-D Exchange Data.

Amyloid fibrils are associated with many neurodegenerative diseases. The application of conventional biophysical techniques including solution NMR and X-ray crystallography for structural characterization of fibrils is limited because they are neither crystalline nor soluble. The Bayesian approach was utilized for extracting the deep UV resonance Raman (DUVRR) spectrum of the lysozyme fibrillar β-sheet based on the hydrogen-deuterium exchange spectral data. The problem was shown to be unsolvable when using blind source separation or conventional chemometrics methods because of the 100% correlation of the concentration profiles of the species under study. Information about the mixing process was incorporated by forcing the columns of the concentration matrix to be proportional to the expected concentration profiles. The ill-conditioning of the matrix was removed by concatenating it to the diagonal matrix with entries corresponding to the known pure spectra (sources). Prior information about the spectral features and characteristic bands of the spectra was taken into account using the Bayesian signal dictionary approach. The extracted DUVRR spectrum of the cross-β sheet core exhibited sharp bands indicating the highly ordered structure. Well resolved sub-bands in Amide I and Amide III regions enabled us to assign the fibril core structure to anti-parallel β-sheet and estimate the amide group facial angle Ψ in the cross-β structure. The elaborated Bayesian approach was demonstrated to be applicable for studying correlated biochemical processes. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]