Figure 13. EM images of lipoproteins formed by α-Syn mutant H50Q. The region enclosed in the rectangle on the right is enlarged on the left. The red and yellow circles have diameters of 3.8 and 5.6 nm predicted by the tetramer and octamer models of Figs. 10 and 11 if the outer Ct barrel is excluded. The gray and pink transparent rectangles over the stack represent side views of octamer Nt-NAC and Ct domains, each pair is 7.5 nm apart. (EM images were modified from Eichmann et al. [19]).
The distance between discs is a relatively constant 7.5 nm, but diameters of the discs vary. Each appears to be comprised of smaller components, suggesting that the number of subassemblies per disc vary (Fig 14a & b). Disc pairs that have approximately the same diameter were grouped; image averaging with Adobe Photoshop was applied to each group to obtain more detailed images (Fig. 14a). These averaged images reveal vertical columns within and sometimes between the discs that are ~ 3.5 nm apart.