A computational analysis of the glycoprotein lipoprotein receptor-related protein 1 structure and the role of glycans as quaternary glue

In short

LRP1 is one of the main receptors that move cargo, amyloid-β included, across the blood–brain barrier. Yet nobody has solved its structure experimentally.

This paper builds it computationally. Homology modelling and neural-network structure prediction, refined with molecular dynamics, give atomistic models of LRP1 both as a monomer and as a dimer, and suggest how the dimer forms.

The simulations also show the receptor's glycans acting as a quaternary glue: they add contacts between the two halves and stabilise the dimer. The models give testable estimates of LRP1's size, domain layout and interface stability, and are deposited in ModelArchive (ma-k8036, ma-ubwf7).

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© The authors, 2026. Open access under CC BY 4.0; shared here unchanged.