Fibrils from synthetic amyloid-related peptides enhance development of experimental AA-amyloidosis in mice.

Amyloid enhancing factor is an incompletely characterized activity of extracts from many amyloid-containing tissues and which greatly shortens the preamyloidotic phase during experimental induction of AA-amyloidosis. In this communication we show that amyloid-like fibrils made in vitro from synthetic peptides, corresponding to segments of amyloid fibril proteins, have amyloid enhancing factor-like activity. Thus, there is a possibility that amyloid enhancing factor activity depends on small fibrils serving as nucleation centers for fibril elongation.