PRIONS AND AMYLOIDS AS SPATIAL TEMPLATES OF THE PROTEOME

Abstract

Until recently, studies of amyloids were aimed exclusively at revealing their role in the occurrence of dangerous diseases in humans and animals. However, they are widely distributed in nature and are involved in the regulation of essential vital processes in representatives of all three domains of the living world: archaea, bacteria and eukaryotes. The question of the biological significance of the prions – a special class of amyloids, isstill under discussion. The discovery of new functional amyloids became possible due to the development of the bioinformatic and proteomic methods for identification of amyloid-forming proteins. The review describes the way from the study of pathological amyloid structures to the investigation of adaptive amyloids inbacteria, plants, and animals. The importance of the amyloid structure, based on the principle of conformation template copying, as one of the most important forms of supramolecular organization of proteins isshown.