To investigate the aggregation inhibitory effect of Chol-PEGs on Aβ, “ThT assay” [
25,
26] was performed. Thioflavin T (ThT) is a fluorescent reagent known to specifically bind to β-sheets, resulting in increased fluorescence intensity. Since Aβ forms a β-sheet structure upon aggregation, the fluorescence intensity derived from ThT increases with the aggregation of Aβ. Consequently, the ThT assay is widely used to observe Aβ aggregation. Here, we performed experiments using Aβ
40, the most abundant Aβ in the brain. The graph showing the fluorescence intensity of each sample over time is presented in
Figure 3. When incubated with Aβ
40 alone, the fluorescence intensity began to increase around 3 hours and stabilized at around 6–7 hours, confirming that aggregation was progressing. This is a typical result of ThT assay to show Aβ aggregation [
27]. When Aβ
40 was incubated with Chol-PEG assemblies at high concentrations (50 times the molar ratio relative to Aβ
40), neither Chol-PEG
2000 micelle nor Chol-PEG
500 vesicle showed a significant increase in fluorescence intensity throughout the measurement period. At low concentrations (10 times the molar ratio relative to Aβ
40), the mixture of Aβ
40 and Chol-PEG
2000 and Chol-PEG
500 delayed the onset time of increase in fluorescence intensity and delayed nucleation. In the mixture of Aβ
40 and Chol-PEG
2000, the fluorescence intensity began to increase at about 20 hours, while that of the mixture with Chol-PEG
500 began to increase at about 40 hours, indicating that Chol-PEG
500 delayed nucleation longer. Furthermore, when low concentrations of Chol-PEG
2000 were added, the value at which the fluorescence intensity plateaued was approximately half that of Aβ
40 alone. This suggests that fibril elongation is stopped midway. Further incubation for up to 72 hours showed that when 10 equivalents of Chol-PEG
500 were added to Aβ
40, the fluorescence intensity at the plateau was 30-40% lower than that of Aβ
40 alone and lower than that of the mixture with Chol-PEG
2000. (
Figure S1). These results indicate that Chol-PEG
500 and Chol-PEG
2000 suppressed the Aβ
40 aggregation at the higher molar ratio than 50 and 10 against Aβ
40, respectively. So far, many reports have showed that cholesterol promoted Aβ aggregation, but our results were an opposite result inhibiting Aβ aggregation. In the ThT assay, it is known that the period from when the fluorescence intensity begins to increase until it plateaus reflects the elongation of amyloid fibrils [
28]. In this study, no significant changes in elongation rate were observed at high concentrations of Chol-PEG
2000 and at all concentrations of Chol-PEG
500, suggesting that Chol-PEGs might suppress nucleation before Aβ monomers form oligomers. Next, ThT assays were performed by adding mPEG-NH
2 of two molecular weights to Aβ
40 as controls. The fluorescence intensity with mPEG-NH
2 was reduced by approximately –30% for PEG
2000 compared to Aβ
40 alone (
Figure S2). It has been reported that the presence of polymers such as PEG can inhibit the binding of Aβ to ThT [
29,
30]. However, such an inhibitory effect of PEG on the binding of Aβ
40 to ThT had minimal impact on the results in our case. This means that both of cholesterol moiety and PEG chain has an important role to inhibit Aβ
40 fibril formation, supporting our hypothesized mechanism shown above. The mixture of Chol-PEG and ThT (without Aβ
40) showed no increase in fluorescence intensity (
Figure S2).