Size of protein aggregates, not abundance, drives spread of prion-based disease
Friday, October 29, 2010 - 08:10
in Biology & Nature
Mad Cow disease and its human variant Creutzfeldt - Jakob disease, which are incurable and fatal, have been on a welcome hiatus from the news for years, but because mammals remain as vulnerable as ever to infectious diseases caused by enigmatic proteins called prions, scientists have taken no respite of their own. In the Oct. 29 edition of the journal Science, researchers at Brown University report a key new insight into how prion proteins - the infectious agents - become transmissible: In yeast at least, it is the size of prion complexes, not their number, that determines their efficiency in spreading...