Many human diseases and the death of most supercentenarians are related to protein aggregation. Neurodegenerative diseases include Alzheimer's disease (AD), Huntington's disease (HD)，Parkinson's disease (PD), frontotemporal lobar degeneration, etc. Such diseases are due to progressive loss of structure or function of neurons caused by protein aggregation. For example, AD is considered to be related to aggregation of Aβ40 and Aβ42 (protein with 42 amino acids) and HD is considered to be related to aggregation of polyQ (polyglutamine) peptides. In this talk, I briefly review our recent discovery on key factors for protein aggregation. We used a lattice model to study the aggregation rates of proteins and found that the probability for a protein sequence to appear in the conformation of the aggregated state can be used to determine the temperature at which proteins can aggregate most easily . We used molecular dynamics and simple models of polymer chains to study relaxation and aggregation of proteins under various conditions and found that when the bending-angle dependent and torsion-angle dependent interactions are zero or very small, then protein chains tend to aggregate at lower temperatures. All atom model was used to identify a key peptide chain for the aggregation of insulin chains and to find that two polyQ chains prefer anti-parallel conformation. It is pointed out that in many cases, protein aggregation does not result from protein mis-folding. A potential drug from Chinese herb is found for Alzheimer's diseases.

胡进锟，1971年获台湾国立清华大学物理系学士学位，1973年和1976年分别获得中央研究院物理所硕士及博士学位。博士毕业后相继在台湾中正理工学院 (1977年)、美国缅因大学(1979年)以及加拿大多伦多大学(1981年)担任副研究员，期间曾在加州大学作博士后研究(1978年)，1984年加入台湾中央研究院物理所担任研究员至今。胡博士的研究方向是统计、计算、非线性及生物物理，研究重要成果为建立晶格模型临界现象统一的渗流理论，发现非常不同的系统可以属于相同的普适性类，找到蛋白质立体结构一个普适的几何因子，并发现影响蛋白质群集现象的关键因素，为预防或治疗神经退化性疾病打开一扇希望之门。胡博士曾多次获得学术奖励及荣誉并在多个学术期刊杂志及国际重要学术组织中任职(如：2002年~2005年IUPAP统计物理委员会副主席)；截至2015年8月，胡博士于专业期刊发表或已接受发表论文共270篇，H指数为35。