Sequence and structure key to prion disease transmission
Monday, June 14, 2010 - 22:20
in Biology & Nature
Prion diseases are lethal neurodegenerative disorders that include Creutzfeldt-Jakob disease (CJD) in humans and bovine spongiform encephalopathy (BSE; commonly known as mad cow disease) in cows. A team of researchers, led by Adriano Aguzzi and Christina Sigurdson, at UniversitaetsSpital Zuerich, Switzerland, has generated data in mice that provides greater understanding of the factors that determine how easy it is for prion diseases to be transmitted to a new host species. This information provides new insight into a highly important food safety issue; dietary exposure to beef contaminated with the BSE agent is believed to have caused nearly 200 cases of variant CJD in humans...