Amyloid detection has been notoriously difficult since current methods are either laborious, toxic and/or tend to detect mature fibrils but not protofibrils or premature aggregates.
Amytracker are fluorescent tracer molecules binding to amyloids with high sensitivity. Amytracker have been shown to bind to prefibrillar states of amyloids and might therefore help to detect and investigate earlier pre-pathological states of amyloid diseases. As Amytracker are fluorescent only when bound to their target, they are well suited for fibrillation studies with much shorter lag phase and less background compared to other small molecule ligands. Amytracker are non-toxic and are well suited for life-cell applications crossing cell membranes with minimal incubation times.