Experimental Insights into Conformational Ensembles of Assembled β-Sheet Peptides

[Image: see text] Deciphering the conformations and interactions of peptides in their assemblies offers a basis for guiding the rational design of peptide-assembled materials. Here we report the use of scanning tunneling microscopy (STM), a single-molecule imaging method with a submolecular resolution, to distinguish 18 types of coexisting conformational substates of the β-strand of the 8-37 segment of human islet amyloid polypeptide (hIAPP 8-37). We analyzed the pairwise peptide–peptide interactions in the hIAPP 8-37 assembly and found 82 interconformation interactions within a free energy difference of 3.40 k(B)T. Besides hIAPP 8-37, this STM method validates the existence of multiple conformations of other β-sheet peptide assemblies, including mutated hIAPP 8-37 and amyloid-β 42. Overall, the results reported in this work provide single-molecule experimental insights into the conformational ensemble and interpeptide interactions in the β-sheet peptide assembly.