Alzheimer's disease is a major health problem that primarily affects the elderly population, leading to progressive and irreversible impairment of functional and behavioral responses. The disease is associated with excessive extracellular accumulation of β-amyloid plaques and intracellular accumulation of neurofibrillary tangles composed of tau protein. Since pathogenesis begins in the body 20–30 years before the first clinical signs appear, new diagnostic approaches are being explored to enable a faster and more accurate diagnosis. To this end, fluorescent probes that emit in the near-infrared range have been developed in the recent decades and, if used in vivo, would represent a major advantage over existing methods. There are a number of requirements for probes that complicate the development of fluorescent probes. These include the requirement for high selectivity for the target biomarkers and emission at wavelengths above 650 nm to prevent light scattering and ensure penetration into deep tissue. When measuring fluorescence, it is important to consider a number of confounding factors, including autofluorescence and quenching.
In our master's thesis, we determined the emission spectra of nine fluorescent probes in the presence of β1-42-amyloid fibrils to determine whether they have the appropriate emission wavelength and sufficient signal intensity, and in the presence of insulin, non-aggregated β1 42-amyloid, bovine and human serum albumin to rule out non-specific binding of the probes and confirm selectivity. After examining the emission spectra, we found that most of the compounds exhibited binding selectivity towards β1-42-amyloid fibrils, as they showed a strong enhancement of the fluorescence emission only when bound to them, but unfortunately the wavelengths of fluorescence emission did not match those deemed suitable according to literature data. The emission spectra obtained provided us with the wavelengths at which we next measured the binding affinity of the fluorescent probes to β1-42-amyloid fibrils and, for selected probes, to insulin fibrils. Binding affinity was measured by the direct increase in fluorescence of the fluorescent probes resulting from binding to the peptide binding sites, with some of the compounds showing high affinity for β1-42-amyloid fibrils and low affinity for insulin fibrils with sufficient reliability, which could ultimately allow distinguishing between structurally different fibrils in complex samples.
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