Article Summary #4

Couzin-Frankel, J. Prion Diseases:No Accomplice Needed. ScienceNOW Daily News. 28 Jan 2010.

The big question is do prions- misfolded versions of healthy protein linked to mad cow and other neurological diseases- infect and cause disease all on their own? Five years ago was when the first major evidence that prions act alone. Prusiner, a biochemist, injected the brains of mice with prions, and the mice came down with neurological disease. There were limitations, though, that the mice took more than a year to become ill and had been bred to produce large amounts of the prion protein. This raised questions to whether they were prone to prion disease anyway.

A biochemist at Ohio State University in Columbus fixed the two problems by coaxing prions to misfold like he believes they do naturally. Instead of misfolding the healthy protein, they combined the healthy protein with blends of lipids. With this, 15 mice brains were injected, and within 130 day, all of the mice looked like the prion disease (their heads twitched, they lost muscle tissue, and became lazy). The mice died several months later. To prove it was prion disease, Ma conducted many tests. Will this information be enough to convince skeptics?