Amyloid Fibrils with Positive Charge Enhance Retroviral Transduction in Mammalian Cells

Amyloid fibrils are cross-beta-sheet-rich protein/peptide fibrils that are typically associated with neurodegenerative diseases such as Parkinson's and Alzheimer's disease. Recently, functional amyloids have been discovered where amyloids are implicated in performing normal physiological functions of the host organism rather than creating diseases. The ability of amyloids to interact with the cell membrane and other small biomolecules exhibits its great potential to be used as a biomaterial for cell adhesion and gene delivery system. Given the established ability of semen derived amyloids to concentrate HIV in semen and that of charged polymers as an enhancer of retroviral gene transfer, we hypothesized that charged amyloid fibrils can augment virus-mediated delivery system. We show that amyloids of alpha-synuclein formed in the presence and absence of cationic polymers chitosan and amyloid of poly-L-lysine can interact with lentiviral particles and enhance transduction efficiency in cells. The amyloid nanofibrils increase transduction efficiency up to 4 fold similar to widely used cationic polymer Polybrene. This study shows that amyloid nanofibril scaffolds may be used as targeted gene delivery systems.