Motivated by the biologically important and complex phenomena of Abeta peptide aggregation in Alzheimers disease, we introduce a model and simulation methodology for studying protein aggregation that includes extra-cellular aggregation, aggregation o
n the cell-surface assisted by a membrane bound protein, and in addition, supply, clearance, production and sequestration of peptides and proteins. The model is used to produce equilibrium and kinetic-aggregation phase diagrams for aggregation onset and of reduced stable Abeta monomer concentrations due to aggregation. The methodology we implemented permits modeling of a phenomenon involving orders of magnitude differences in time scales and concentrations which can be retained in the simulation. We demonstrate how to identify ranges of parameter values that give monomer concentration depletion upon aggregation similar to that observed in Alzheimers disease. We show how very different behavior can be obtained as reaction parameters and protein concentrations vary, and discuss the difficulty reconciling results of experiments from two vastly different concentration regimes. The latter is an important general issue in relating in-vitro and mice based experiments to humans.
