Waltz, AlphaFold and ESMfold Predictions on a Human Prion Protein Tiled Peptide Library Highlight a C-Terminal Region with Strong Conformational Sensitivity

Authors

Grant, J. E., Vranicar, S. J.

Abstract

Short, linear sequence motifs within the human prion protein (PrP) may encode local aggregation tendencies that are not apparent from full-length sequence analysis. To map intrinsic amyloidogenic potential across PrP, we generated a complete one-residue-step library of overlapping 15-mer peptides from the 253-residue human PrP sequence and evaluated each peptide using WALTZ in both high-specificity and best-overall-performance modes, with full-length SNPeffect4/WALTZ output used for comparison. Peptide-level WALTZ analysis identified several candidate amyloidogenic regions, including an N-terminal signal-peptide segment spanning approximately residues 8-21/22 that was not detected in the publicly available full-length WALTZ/SNPeffect4 output. Predictions made using AlphaFold 3.0 also identified a short C-terminal area whose representative peptides formed either alpha-helix or pair of beta-strands, indicating a region of potential higher susceptibility to conformational dynamics. This computational study supports the use of peptide tiling as a complementary screening strategy for identifying candidate short aggregation-prone motifs in PrP and other misfolding-associated proteins.

Preprint server: bioRxiv
The authors list and abstract were imported from bioRxiv on 06 Aug 2026.

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