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."

Comments

Shaking

[wsherman]

Back when I was doing research on how individual proteins clump together to form the "amyloid" type of deposits found in diseases like Alzheimer's and diabetes, I had results from looking at the deposit formation in test tubes suggesting that deposit formation was promoted by shaking.

The guy in charge of the project wasn't interested in pursuing the results because the intersection of protein dynamics and hydrodynamics wasn't somewhere he wanted to go.

It will be interesting to see if they can develop anything more than handwaving explanations for how the shaking is causing the prions to change structure. Standard molecular dynamics simulations of proteins don't model mixing behavior of the water molecules surrounding the protein. Part of this may be due to the different time scales of the two phenomena.