Artificial prions
[I have followed BSE research superficially for a couple of years. Some doubted that prions are the infectious agent at all - now Prusiner has managed to create artificial prions and apparently demonstrated their infectiousness. I am not an AAAS member so I don't know what's hiding behind the Science link.]
Scientists Make Madcow Prion in Lab for First Time
Thu Jul 29, 2004 11:36 PM ET
news.yahoo.com
WASHINGTON (Reuters) - Researchers have for the first time made a prion in the laboratory and used it to demonstrate that the misfolded proteins are indeed the sole cause of mad cow disease, the U.S. and German scientists reported Thursday.
The research, published in the journal Science, also may help open the way to treatments for the currently untreatable and incurable family of prion diseases, which include not only mad cow but the human Creutzfeldt Jakob disease, and a related human form of CJD caused by eating mad cow-infected beef.
"Our study demonstrates that misfolding a particular segment of the normal prion protein is sufficient to transform the protein into infectious prions," said lead researcher Giuseppe Legname at the University of California San Francisco. Scientists from the Heinrich-Heine Universitat in Duesseldorf, Germany also took part in the study.
The researchers created a synthetic prion by using bacteria to grow prion fragments and then folding them into larger protein structures.
They injected these into the brains of mice bred to be susceptible to transmissible spongiform encephalopathies such as bovine spongiform encephalopathy -- mad cow disease -- CJD and others. The mice started showing symptoms in about a year, the researchers reported.
...
Synthetic Mammalian Prions
Giuseppe Legname, Ilia V. Baskakov, Hoang-Oanh B. Nguyen, Detlev Riesner, Fred E. Cohen, Stephen J. DeArmond, and Stanley B. Prusiner
Science 30 July 2004: 671-673
sciencemag.org
[ Edit - NYT article: #reply-20361747 ] |
