Fibrillation of glucagon

The peptide glucagon is used as the antidote to hypoglycaemia in diabetic patients. Although the fibrillation tendency is even more pronounced than for insulin, it has been the subject of very few studies. Since early 2002, the group ofDaniel Otzen at Aalborg University has worked with fibrillation of glucagon.. Fibril formation has been studied under a number of different conditions (pH, different salts etc.) and the resulting fibrils characterized by circular dichroism, electron microscopy, FT-IR, atomic force microscopy, small-angle X-ray scattering and other methods. In the present project, it is the ambition to build on this prior experience. However, the major focus will now shift to surface effects, which offer a quite different set of unanswered questions and which have direct technological relevance. In addition to the classical biophysical methods in solution, quartz crystal microbalance with dissipation (QCM-D) will be used to characterise binding to hydrophobic surfaces and InfraRed Reflection Absorption Spectroscopy, IRRAS which measures the infrared absorption spectrum of the surface layer, will be used to detect structural change of the peptide layer at the air-water interface. Samarbejdspartnere: Christian Beyschau Andersen (AAU/Novo Nordisk A/S), Christian Rischel (Novo Nordisk A/S)