Allura red rapidly induces amyloid-like fibril formation in hen egg white lysozyme at physiological pH

Allura red (AR) is an artificial azo dye mostly used in food industries and has potential health risks. We examined the role of AR in amyloidogenesis using hen egg white lysozyme (HEWL) at pH 7.0. The amyloidogenic induction properties of AR in HEWL were identified by circular dichroism (CD), turbidity, intrinsic fluorescence, light scattering, transmission electron microscopy (TEM), and molecular dynamic simulation studies. Turbidity and light scattering measurements showed that HEWL becomes aggregated in the presence of 0.03–15.0 mM of AR at pH 7.0 but not at very low AR concentrations (0.01–0.28 mM). However, AR-induced aggregation is a kinetically rapid process, with no observable lag phase and saturation within 6 s. The kinetics results suggested that the HEWL aggregation induced by AR is very rapid. The CD results demonstrated that the total β-sheet content of HEWL was increased in the AR treated samples. The TEM results are established that AR-induced aggregates had amyloid-like structures. Molecular dynamics simulations analysis showed that the bound AR-HEWL structures were highly favored compared to unbound structures. The mechanism of AR-induced amyloid fibril formation may involve electrostatic, hydrogen bonding, and hydrophobic interactions.