The BBC is reporting on a study published in Nature that proposes a mechanism by which prions, the misfolded proteins suspected of causing so-called “mad cow” disease, chronic wasting disease in deer, and the human analogue, new-variant Creutzfeld-Jakob disease, get their shapes and “reproduce.”
Essentially, prions are governed by the folding “rules” that govern ordinary proteins: temperature, pH, and hydrophobicity of their environment will affect their shape. The researchers subjected yeast prions to heat, causing some of them to unfold and re-fold into a different configuration. These modified prions then served as templates in the development of identical prions when introduced into prion-free yeast, much as DNA or RNA can serve as a template for the manufacture of more RNA or DNA.
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