Oxidation sets off fatal structural change of human prion proteins
Thursday, April 23, 2009 - 07:49
in Biology & Nature
Prion diseases like the Creutzfeldt-Jakob disease mainly appear spontaneously in humans. They are characterised by the aggregation of a misfolded isoform of the cellular prion protein. Scientists at the Max Planck Institute of Biochemistry and the LMU Munich have now uncovered the cause of the misfolding: an oxidation within the prion molecule...