Preformed Seeds Modulate Native Insulin Aggregation Kinetics

Insulin aggregates under storage conditions via disulfide interchange reaction. It is also known to form aggregates at the site of repeated injections in diabetes patients, leading to injection amyloidosis. This has fueled research in pharmaceutical and biotechnology industry as well as in academia to understand factors that modulate insulin stability and aggregation. The main aim of this study is to understand the factors that modulate aggregation propensity of insulin under conditions close to physiological and measure effect of “seeds” on aggregation kinetics. We explored the aggregation kinetics of insulin at pH 7.2 and 37 °C in the presence of disulfide-reducing agent dithiothreitol (DTT), using spectroscopy (UV–visible, fluorescence, and Fourier transform infrared spectroscopy) and microscopy (scanning electron microscopy, atomic force microscopy) techniques. We prepared insulin “seeds” by incubating disulfide-reduced insulin at pH 7.2 and 37 °C for varying lengths of time (10 min to 12 h). These se...