Chameleon behaviour of α-synuclein: Brownian dynamics simulations of protein aggregation

Over the past decades a large number of studies have been carried out in order to determine the physiological function of α-synuclein and its implication in Parkinson's disease. A complementary tool to experiments are computer simulations, which are intensively used for problems for which experiments can not yet provide a clear answer. In this thesis, we focused on studying the aggregation of α-synuclein by using coarse grained representation of the protein. We introduced a polymorph patchy particle model to describe α-synuclein and have combined it with Brownian Dynamics simulations to describe the translational and rotational dynamics. In addition, to describe the chameleonic nature of the protein, we used Brownian Dynamics to describe the internal dynamics of the particles. The internal state is coupled to the interactions between the particles.