Airborne Mad Cow??? That's Strange...
Sunday, January 30, 2011 - 23:40
in Biology & Nature
This has to rank as one of the most unusual papers I've seen in a while. A study in this month's PLoS Pathogens found mice could be infected with airborne scrapie prions. Diseases like scrapie(a disease of sheep) and mad cow are thought to be caused by a misfolded version of the PrP protein that can bind to properly-folded protein and convert it to the misshapen form. These misfolded proteins are called prions. read more