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Artificial Prion Created
jabberjaw writes "Nature is reporting that researchers at the University of California San Diego have created a synthetic prion which, when injected into mice will bring about symptoms similar to those displayed by cattle suffering from bovine spongiform encephalopathy, aka mad cow disease. The researchers first crafted healthy prion proteins using bacteria. They then shook these proteins until they resembled the tangled structure of an unhealthy prion. Afterwords, these prions were injected into the brains of mice who fell ill two years later. Perhaps someone who is more familiar with this field of research would care to fill us in on the details as the article was rather light."
because prions are more basic and fundamental than even germs/viruses. most modern methods of treating diseases and fighting virus involve disrupting the replication process of the virus/germs, usually by the means of inhibiting certain proteins. however prions themselves are malformed proteins that malform other good proteins. this mechanism is quite hard to stop because it is so simple, there is no complicated repoduction chain to disrupt like a virus. there is only one way to stop this chain, which is to basically burn the protein to a crisp.
They couldn't fix my brakes, so they made my horn louder.
That seems to suggest there were other WMDs. Coulda sworn they haven't found any...
Terrorists don't need weapons of mass descruction. The States has been mired in fear for the past three years and all the terrorists had were box cutters.
"Why can't everyone just be straight with me?"
"Because we live in a bendy world, dear."
That's most likely... by creating a model disease in a biological system, different drugs can be tried out on it to test efficacy.
There are all sorts of protocols like this already... ie, EAE (Experimental Allergic EncephaloMyelitis) where they give mice... um... artificial MS, then test drug canidates out on them to see what the effect is. It's not very nice to watch.
That's why I'm glad that I'm in molecular studies. However, it's done to help people with these diseases, and animal reseach is really the only way to conduct some of these tests.
Peace...
'Quantum materiae materietur marmota monax si marmota monax materiam possit materiari?'
You will not catch AIDS by drinking water, but prions might do the trick, given how they survive cooking and even burning.
Not exactly. It all depends on how they learn to perform the forward process. For example, if scientists "discover" that they can shatter glass by throwing a hard object at it, all it tells them is that they need to keep glass away from hard objects. However, if scientists "discover" a weak-spot in this supposedly shatter-proof glass, then they'll have something they can concentrate on fixing to make it less shatter-prone.
It seems to me that the scientists figured out a way to develop a prion and show that it causes disease, but it wasn't concentrated on finding out which parts of mice were susceptible.
...and as far as I know, none of those bombs you're referring to are WMDs.
Besides, that's not what I was suggesting; clearly terrorists have weapons that go beyond box cutters. But the point of terrorism is to inflict terror - and you don't need to have weapons of mass destruction to do that. You don't even have to kill that many people to create an undue amount of fear.
And yes, there is a real threat, but it's probably not big enough for most people to worry about it: the odds aren't really anything to get worked up over. (This isn't to say that you shouldn't be worried about terrorism, but it's wise to be rational about it.)
But back to the original point, you don't need WMDs to be a successful terrorist. It's much easier to build a bomb than to build and harvest prions and successfully introduce those into a population, so terrorism is more likely to be carried out through low-tech means.
"Why can't everyone just be straight with me?"
"Because we live in a bendy world, dear."
Even those who arrange and design shrubberies are under considerable economic stress at this period in history.
I hadn't heard about mice having the syndrome before. Are these novel prions? i.e. are they creating a new thing that's similar to mad cow, but differnt and never before seen? Since these things can be transmitted from one group of animals to another, (i believe it's sheep and cows that can trade it, and cows and humans that can trade it, but not humans and sheep directly (is that right?)) I'm just hoping that there careful not to contract it to a new animal population in the wild. It might come back to us through a animal other then cows.
Yeah, I'm sure these scientists don't understand the necessity of a control group. They probably think their drug causes aging and death too.
That being said, in this prion story, we have an some example of postulates 2-4. The Prusiner team synthesized an artificial agent that's implicated in disease, and used it to infect and create new diseased organisms. This is a scientific step forward. Previously, the prion agent itself correlative with disease, but as to whether it is the causative agent, it was unclear.
The brief criticisms in the NY Times articles may have some merit though. It's still possible that the disease has some other underlying cause, and the artificial prion only hastened onset. This is an important point, because the signs of aggregate prions (the amyloid plaques) are found in BOTH healthy and diseased animals, thereby violating the first Koch postulate in some sense. However, I warn the reader that my knowledge is deficient here. Perhaps the amyloid plaques are composed of misfolded variants of other proteins also.
This is a rough summary of what I know. I hope I haven't offended any experts who know the details. Please feel free to correct what I'm sure are numerous mistakes.
Maybe if we'd consider the crazy idea that in nature, herbivores don't eat other herbivores, but when fed a regular diet made up of their friends and family, weird shit might happen?
...threatens the minds of this generation? 6 billion people worldwide, 167 confirmed cases ever worldwide. Whatever your statistical thinking, I doubt many logical, non-scare-hype-submitting people would call that a threat. It's a shame, though, that most people DO appear to feel threatened by this and fail to stop and think about the actual risks involved.
If you'd like to contribute to work studying the mysterious nature of protein folding, consider donating your spare CPU cycles to the Folding @ Home distributed project - a worthy project made even more relevant in the light of these new discoveries. I don't pretend to understand much about the biology behind it all, but this stuff fascinates me, and it looks like the more focus this field receives, the more humanity on the whole will benefit.
Perhaps the answer to the problem of teenagers dropping bricks from motorway and railway bridges is to sue Tetris.
Scientists have created something that kills mice when injected into them. There's already thousands of things that can do that.
If you want to eliminate CJD, BSE etc... you need to improve the conditions that animals are raised in. Allowing them to be raised in poor conditions and then expecting the scientists to cure them when they get ill is stupid. Not to mention all the animals that will have to die and suffer just to cure animals for cheap food.
Wasn't feeling like /. without some idiotic conspiracy theory. And hey, look, it's the old favourite: those evil pharma corporations are all refusing to develop a cure.
Never mind that:
1. There _is_ money in a cure. If you had a cure for, say, Cancer and a 20 year patent on it, you could sell it for any sky-high amount of money you'd want to. It's the perfect extortion scheme. You pay up or you die a slow painful death.
2. Lo and behold, they did make cures and vaccines for a metric buttload of diseases.
3. Most importantly: there are doctors, pharmacists, managers at pharmaceuticals corporations, etc, who die of Cancer every year. Or have a bad case of diabetes. Or whose _child_ is dying of some disease.
Now you're telling me no less than they'll rather patiently wait for their own death -- or the death of those they love -- rather than break the conspiracy oath and divulge the cure. Doesn't that strike you as a completely retarded idea? If _you_ could make a cure, and you'll _die_ if you don't, wouldn't you just make the stupid cure already?
4. We're talking millions of doctors, pharmacists and researchers world wide. Some in countries where they don't even have private enterprise as you know it. (E.g., until recently the USSR and to some extent still China.) Or where it's not even easy to keep in touch with a western conspiracy. (E.g., the USSR block was pretty much isolated and guarded by a paranoid secret police.) And which invested hundreds of billions in researchs. (E.g., in developping their own nuclear weapons, sattellites, chemical weapons, biological weapons, ICBMs, etc.)
Yet you'd want me to believe that _all_ those are part of the same global conspiracy to keep some diseases untreated.
You know what? There's a medical name for that. It's called "Paranoia".
A polar bear is a cartesian bear after a coordinate transform.
As if the world isn't filled with mad people, the "artificial prion", no matter for whatever noble reason it was created, will eventually be used as yet another weapon for Bio Warfare.
Think of it
Drop something like this, over a population, wait for 5 - 10 years, and you enemy will be infected, and become "mad".
And btw, a protein isn't something that's included in any international convention regarding biowarfare agent. It isn't a toxic gas, nor germs/bacteria/viruses. Plus you can always argue that the thing occurs in the nature !
Muchas Gracias, Señor Edward Snowden !
Now you've brought up an interesting point. I'm probably ill-informed, but from what I've heard/read, prion diseases seem to be showing up in herbivores induced into unnatural diets. Domesticated animals get it through feed we give them.
How do deer get it, because I've heard of it there, too.
Why don't scavengers get it? It seems to me that it would be a rather normal cause of death, or at least normal to be found in early stages, at time of death.
The living have better things to do than to continue hating the dead.
The parent isn't an idiot. Yes, Alzheimer's and Parkinson's may be closely related to CJD.
No... No one has ever conclusively demonstrated that you can take a prion from one species and use it to induce a prion state in another species. The current article fails to show any significant effect on mice using sheep scrapie Sc237 in mice. There have been one or two other research groups who have practically saturated one species with the prion of another and then claimed to find evidence of interspecies crossing. That research is dubious at best.
+++ATHZ 99:5:80
Well, seeing as that it's in Science, it probably was reviewed. RML is a purifed prion preparation (made by Rocky Mountain Labs), and is a common positive control in prion studies. To the grandparent: the scientists that still dismiss prion disease are few and far between. The majority of the scientific community accepts the prion mechanism of transmission now. This was not the case a few years ago, but it's an accepted mechanism now.
All that said, I do think it's a bit of a stretch to call these "synthetic prions". I only skimmed the paper so far, but as far as I can tell, they state that these are only infectious in mice that already overexpress an aberrant protein (16 fold!) in the CNS.
The big thing that gets me is the lack of controls. This is a Science paper; where is the CD1 mouse infected with the 'synthetic prion'? My guess is that it didn't get disease, so they excluded the data. Fig 1C starts to show this a little, but still lacks proper controls. Here, they show that brain homogenate from 9949 mice hit with seeded protein can induce disease in normal (FVB) mice. They still don't do complete controls, though. Where is the homogenate + CD1 mouse? The FVB + vehicle mouse? Heck, where are the loading controls? Come on, a Science paper without loading controls???? It's not exactly the kind of thing that belongs in "unpublished data".
The positive side is that they seem to have confirmed the role of beta-rich regions in prion disease, and the importance of crystal/amyloid formation (which has been downplayed recently due to gross pathologic findings; this suggests that micro-plaques will also cause disease). Hammering out the structural domains responsible for disease is an important step.
There is a reason for everything. Sometimes that reason just sucks.
There have been one or two other research groups who have practically saturated one species with the prion of another and then claimed to find evidence of interspecies crossing. That research is dubious at best.
Hey, that's the same standard of proof we have for MDMA neurotoxicity.
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