

Prions jump species barrier - soundsop
http://www.nature.com/news/2008/080904/full/news.2008.1080.html

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mechanical_fish
Oh, joy.

Among other things, I guess this might be a big step on the way to proving a
mechanism that relates bovine CJD to human CJD.

Nice article. I didn't know that there was a single "prion protein" that was
causing all the trouble -- I had assumed there were different misfolded
proteins causing different diseases. (Which, in a sense, there are -- the
exact structure of the prion protein differs from species to species, which is
what this article is about. And perhaps there are other, unrelated proteins
that exhibit the same sort of problem, and this is just the first one we've
found?)

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biohacker42
I can't recall if it was already proven that bovine CJD came from feeding them
scrapie sheep? Or was it scrapie sheep that were not heated high enough to
save money.

In any case, prions are scary fascinating.

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ojbyrne
I'm reading "The Omnivore's Dilemma" - great book btw - but it mentions in
passing that we still feed cow nervous tissue to pigs and chickens, which
seems kind of scary in light of this article.

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Protophore
Interesting article, but it seems to me that this is one of those instances
where science takes nature farther than it might go on its own. I can't see
that these tests prove anything other than that we can induce a reaction
between prions from one animal brain protein from another. I don't believe
that this alone can be used as a predictor of real life occurrences. There are
a lot of things that we can force to occur in a test tube that would never
occur by themselves.

