Aitor Franco

Protein aggregation is a hallmark of major neurodegenerative disorders. Increasing data suggest that smaller aggregates cause higher toxic response than filamentous aggregates (fibrils). However, the size of small aggregates has challenged their detection within biologically relevant environments. Here, we report approaches to quantitatively super-...

The aggregation of α-synuclein is the hallmark of a collective of neurodegenerative disorders known as synucleinopathies. The tendency to aggregate of this protein, the toxicity of its ag-gregation intermediates and the ability of the cellular protein quality control system to clear these intermediates seems to be regulated, among other factors, by...

Neurodegenerative diseases (NDs) are increasingly positioned as leading causes of global deaths. The accelerated aging of the population and its strong relationship with neurodegeneration forecast these pathologies as a huge global health problem in the upcoming years. In this scenario, there is an urgent need for understanding the basic molecular...

Significance Although the human disaggregase machinery has been shown to disassemble mature α-synuclein amyloid fibrils, the molecular mechanism that drives the process has remained elusive. In this work, we show that amyloid disassembly is initiated by the destabilization of the fibril ends, followed by the fast propagation of protofilament unzipp...

Nucleoplasmin (NP) is a pentameric histone chaperone that regulates the condensation state of chromatin in different cellular processes. We focus here on the interaction of NP with the histone octamer, showing that NP could bind sequentially the histone components to assemble an octamer-like particle, and crosslinked octamers with high affinity. Th...

Cells have evolved an ingenious way to tightly pack the genetic information in a nucleoprotein complex called chromatin. The functional unit of chromatin is the nucleosome, which is made of DNA wrapped around histones. Dynamic modulation of nucleosome structure by regulating the association/dissociation of histones to/from DNA is essential for DNA...

Nucleoplasmin (NP) is an abundant histone chaperone in vertebrate oocytes and embryos involved in storing and releasing maternal histones to establish and maintain the zygotic epigenome. NP has been considered a H2A–H2B histone chaperone, and recently it has been shown that it can also interact with H3-H4. However, its interaction with different ty...