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Prions Observed Jumping Species Barrier
palegray.net writes "Nature is reporting on new findings that prions jump species barriers. Believed to be responsible for ailments such as Creutzfeld-Jakob disease and 'mad cow' disease, prions are thought to disrupt biological processes by causing normal proteins to fold abnormally. Researchers at the University of Texas Medical Branch in Galveston have observed infectious prions from hamsters causing abnormal protein development in mice, along with a range of other observations on prion actions in test tube environments. From the article: '... they also found that when a prion jumps species, it produces a new kind of prion. "This is very worrisome," says Claudio Soto, who led the research, published in Cell. "The universe of possible prions could be much larger than we thought."' Sounds like another good reason to donate your spare CPU cycles to projects like Folding@home."
On the flip side, if your energy source is dirty, turning off F@H might be more beneficial in the long run. It's a trade off.
Considering that we force feed cows and chickens the meat bi-products of the industry, we're actually causing a great deal of this to happen. In a perfect world we'd not feed herbivores rudiments and accelerate this type of process. But then again, garbage in garbage out, we deserve what we get.
For those with access to the journal Cell, you can view The Castilla, et al, paper online (this abstract should be available for all). The nature link in the summary goes to a write-up about the article, not the actual article itself.
Those with subscriptions to Cell can also get the full text, Full Text in PDF, and the Supplementary Data.
Damn_registrars has no butt-hole. Damn_registrars has no use for a butt-hole.
Mods, note that the parent post is NOT offtopic. It's talking about mad cows.
Nature is reporting on new findings that prions jump species barriers
It's confirmed. Our planet (i.e. Nature) is sentient and into science journalism!
That's nothing. I have peons swarming my village.
"The universe of possible prions could be much larger than we thought."' Sounds like another good reason to donate your spare CPU cycles to projects like Folding@home."
Can I donate my spare prions instead?
Shai Schticks:"You don't make peace with friends, you make peace with enemies"
LOL.
While I certainly wouldn't want to get any of the prion diseases, they are all rather nasty, I find the existence of prions fascinating. They are arguably even less alive than viruses, though not by much, and yet they multiply(in a sense), and exist in all sorts of variants.
It seems like any sufficiently complex system(biological proteins in this case), is at considerable risk of having something analogous to life spring up and cause trouble.
I KNEW IT ALL ALONG!!!
[End Of Line]
So prions can make proteins into prions in other species, e.a. cross the species barrier? Big deal. We knew this in the nineties when the whole mad-cow disease was all over the news.
I'm sure it has some scientific significance, but I think the real question is how (ingested) prions reach the central nervous system, where the damage is done. And why it takes so long or doesn't happen at all in most cases.
Now that would shed some light on the amount of risk that eating a possibli infected piece of meat would pose. That would be news.
I guess prions take the Folding@Home idea a bit too literally.
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I work for one of Claudio Soto's former PhD students. From my brief skimming of this paper, it seems to be a simple proof-of-concept transmission between mice and hampsters. The discussion section, like a lot of science, is pure speculation - logical, but no need for slashdotters to scream "OMG we're all going to die!"
I'm an avid MN deer hunter (and consumer...) and I've done a significant amount of work with PrP infected mice. While not worried about going crazy and having my brain melt in 15 years, I have quit giving blood to the Red Cross. In my opinion, nobody has any "28 days" type fears to raise.
sorry..had to reply to change my moderation - damn automatic mod system :/
I'm sorry, but Creutzfeld-Jakob disease is a bit more than an "ailment." It's deadly and incurable. I think a slightly stronger word would be in order.
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Just as long as it's not folding@mybrain!
Knowledge is how to play a game, intelligence is how to win, wisdom is knowing what game to play.
Prof. Charles Francis Xavier:
"This process is slow, and normally taking thousands and thousands of years. But every few hundred millennia, evolution leaps forward."
"We called them, X-Prions"
to the old saying "you are what you eat"
The US Food and Drug Administration has banned donations of blood from people who lived in Britain during a certain time. All to prevent the spread of an ailment that so far (in my case at least) has had 30 years to manifest itself but hasn't as of yet. At this rate, I won't contract Creutzfeldt-Jakob Disease until I turn 150.
No mod points, no meta-moderating/Firehose/all the other free work Slashdot wants me to do.
Worrisome for who? The cannibals? Stop eating brains!
Just because you can, does not mean you should.
I couple of years back, I did a lot of reading on Mad Cow. There were so many examples of it jumping the species barrier...and some of them many, many years old.
Here is an example from 18 years ago:
-=-=-=
http://www.highbeam.com/doc/1G1-111779850.html
WASHINGTON -- Eighteen years before last week's first confirmed case of mad cow disease in the United States, investigators concluded that an epidemic of a brain-wasting disease on a Wisconsin mink farm was probably caused by a malady similar to mad cow disease.
The Wisconsin farmer had fed his mink a steady supply of "downer" cows -- too sick or injured to move on their own -- like the one that tested positive for mad cow disease in Washington state last week. On Tuesday, the Department of Agriculture banned such animals for human consumption.
Long before the USDA action, the mink industry began discouraging farmers ..
-=-=-=
It is basically that anyone who did a little study would know that it could jump the species barrier...but it just can't do that until some people in white coats tell us it can do that...then it can.
transporter_ii
Doctors destroy health, lawyers destroy justice, universities destroy knowledge, religion destroys spirituality
It made me wonder, if it changes when it jumps species, maybe prion diseases are something new, so I did some quick checking on Wikipedia. I didn't track down more stuff yet, but I plan on following up. I didn't realize this, but it appears that a lot of prion diseases are fairly recent developments. Scrapie showed up in 1732, Bovine Spongiform Encephalopathy in the 1800s, CJD showed up around 1920, Kuru in 1957, Chronic Wasting Disease in 1967, Feline Spongiform Enecephalopathy 1990.
And these are more than half of the diseases caused by prions, I believe. That's more than a bit disconcerting.
... Mark Purdey was, of course, the British beef farmer who had a different theory about Mad Cow. In the 80's the British government required all cattle to be dosed with an Organo-phostate pesticide, to combat a warble fly epidemic (these bugs punch holes in cattle skin, making the hides less suitable for leather seats).
Purdey was an organic farmer, and sued to protect his right to keep synthetic pesticides away from his herd. He won. A few years later Chernobyl went off, and some time after that the first Mad Cow epidemic occured. Purdey's cows were mostly immune. He had a few mad cows, but these were mostly transplants to his herd which had, presumably, been dosed with the pestacide.
As the years went by, Purdey turned into a scientist himself, doing the research that the british government wouldn't do because of their potential liability in having caused the mad-cow epidemic (by require farmers to poison their herds).
Basically, the pesticide used chellated (removed) copper from the treated body. Somehow manganese substitutes for copper, but it isn't a good subsitute. The radioactive fallout from Chernobyl didn't help things either. It's been years since I first read Purdey's site, so I don't remember the details.
He commented that the Mad Cow in Washington (the northwest state) came from a copper-deficient pasture in Canada, into an area where quite a bit of nuclear weapons research had been done in decades past. The mad deer in Colorado also occupy a site with extensive radiologic environmental poisoning.
So basically, Purdey's theory is that prions are an effect of environmental poisoning, not the cause of Mad-Cow-esque disease.
Purdey is deceased now (brain cancer?), but his site's still live. Definitely recommended reading.
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rodent would be the genus, hamster would be the species.
Many of the proteins of the mammals are qu7ite in common except sometimes for a few details. If those few details make no difference to the attack site of the prion, it ain't that surprising that other similar brain protein can similarly badly in other mammals. Sooooo we should simply ban utterly to feed other dead mammals protein to other specy which are for human consumption (cue the sales of meat carcass into pet food....).
C. Sagan : A demon haunted world:
http://www.amazon.com/gp/product/0345409469/
visit randi.org
Just build a giant wall between our species and the rest. Use lots of high tech things like cameras, UAVs, and the like. That'll work.
-- Fugacity: Confusing chemists since 1908
Become a vegetarian and loose the risk of contracting a scary prion disease from your food. Prion diseases are awful- I'd take an STD or physical handicap any day over one of those. Now I understand that the USA only randomly checks 1% of cattle for mad cow disease. Since we HAVE had cattle found with it before that stands to reason that cattle with prion diseases have made it into the food supply. The scariest part is these prion diseases can have incubation periods in both cattle and humans for many years. If a cow does not show symptoms it is not likely to be checked for the disease even if it carries it. A tainted burger your parents bought you from McDonald's (containing meat from who knows how many different cows) when you were 10 might not show symptoms till you're 40+ and at that point how could anyone ever trace it to any particular time/place/meal? No- I'm not a vegetarian, but I am seriously considering dropping all animals from my diet except birds and fish.
Sounds like another good reason to donate your spare CPU cycles to projects like Folding@home."
So the public is donating a lot of computing time and electrical energy. What does the public get back?
If Folding@Home goes towards lining the pockets of a university endowment or a drug company's coffers, count me out. If the research product is required to be free from patents, and available for public good...full speed ahead. Somehow, I seriously doubt that any successful results will be freely available.
Please help metamoderate.
There is not such a thing as "spare CPU cycles" since when you run a *@home program, CPU power consumption pikes.
In a laptop, when running any CPU intensive distributed program, battery level is stuck since all the power goes to the CPU instead of charging the battery.
DNA in your Linux: DNALinux
Am I the only one who read that as "prisons" and immediately wondered why we started locking up animals?
:(){
For this issue Rosetta at home (Boinc) might be a better choice for protein structure. It's already wokring on the prion problem.
Some drink at the fountain of knowledge. Others just gargle.
Jim the crowbar is in my prion.
A Good Troll is better than a Bad Human.
They eat normal protien. Bad protien is both offspring and a waste product.
While Mark Purdey may not be right about organophosphates (although they may have been a contributing factor) he is (was) correct that the scientific orthodoxy about CJ-like diseases is wrong.
Although prions are not directly my area of research, I have been an interested observer. It is my belief that the idea tha prions are a self-reproducing pathogenic protein (the idea that won Stanley Prusiner a Nobel Prize) is fundamentally wrong. So called "prion diseases" do, in fact, have have nucleic acid genome.
Now, there are not many people who are willing to go up against a Nobel Prize winner and 20 years of research - getting funding for such heretical ideas is not easy.
However, I do believe and hope that the truth of the situation will become apparent and "Science" will have some serious questions to ask itself... how can we have been so wrong about this for so long..?
So, while some of the results of Folding@Home are pretty amazing, spending any CPU time on the structure of prion proteins is utterly pointless.
BTW, if you want to play with protein structures, check out FoldIt (fold.it), it's made by the same people who made Folding@Home, it's pretty cool (there is no "Linux" version - so not that cool (it does run under Wine though)).
I would like to express my disappointment at the title *not* being "Prisons Observed Jumping Species Barrier", which is what I swear it was until I clicked the link.
I would also be in dire need of sleep.
in the meat industry. im sure that they follow all the safety laws as well as the follow immigration law.
and im sure the governent is enforcing saftey law about as well as it enforces immigration law.
especially when meat companies buy off politicians every day, especially in rural states
especially when politicians think the law is an annoyance to their grand schemes.
For a second i read Prisons and my thought was flying to two facts:
1) All the homo stuff makes new *species*--i mean how is that even possible???
2) Mad Cow??? Do they serve all the bad beef in prison???
Note to submitter: Pls. be clear when you submit things like this: It shocks the hell out of some people.
"Doing what i can, with what i have." ~ Burt Gummer
The prion hypothesis was developed many years ago. The term is the condensed form of the "protein only" theory, prion... Whereby CJD developed presumably from scrapie or MCD... Which involved the transfer across the species barrier and made headlines... And now in 2008 you slashdot nerds have come across a new revelation that prions cross species barriers when that is how the term was originally coined... Deary me. Perhaps someone will discover that the world is really round.
This and that
I don't know how this applies.
Prions come from outer space and mutate under radioactive conditions that cause epilepsy in scientists...
All hail the Prions Of Ori!
The jumping accross species is known and documented for quite some time, specially regarding prions from mad cow disease.
Similarily, I remember reading articles in 3rd year medicine(*) about difference in prion foldings between species (explain the initial slow development of inter-species spreading compared to intra-specie spreading) and emergence of newer folding pattern (after a while a new more efficient pattern emerges)
I fail to see how this is news worthy, except maybe some lab trying to justify spending the grant it has obtained.
Oh yeah, I know. /. is all about dupes and they found a new meta-dupe : two /. entries giving the same info but sourced in different articles :-P
---
*: And just to show how it is old : since then I graduated and had even had time to get a 2nd master.
"Sufficiently advanced satire is indistinguishable from reality." - [Tips: 1DrYakQDKCQ6y52z6QbnkxHXAocMZJE61o ]
I'm not sure what you point is. Your story has a very complex entity (God) creating life. My story has something much simpler than life doing it.
Some versions of Intelligent Design have the Designer doing it all through initial conditions. But you're right in that such out of band effects are irrelevant for science.
an even better reason to go vegetarian. Or at least not eat beef.
Now that I am at work, where I have access to cell, I can read the article and attempt to explain its significance. I will attempt to do this without violating copyright - although I see the work was supported by National Institutes of Health (NIH) funding, which requires that the papers be released to the public (within a certain time frame).
The paper mentions that the species barrier has been crossed by some prions (BSE) but not others (scrapies). They are looking for a way to show cross-species interactions without having to use whole organisms. One of their findings was a "novel" prion by using cell extract of two different species (mouse and hamster).
They also commented that there is no current method for predicting which prions will cross species barriers - after all it is driven by a protein-protein interaction, as the prion-based conditions carry no genetic component of infection.
They further mentioned that their in vitro work showed prions can move across the species barriers without cellular material, generating unique prions in this manner. From my perspective, I would say this could be one of the more significant parts of the study - it could mean that the prions are stable enough to not need a cellular carrier, and could potentially be picked up through secondary contact.
Damn_registrars has no butt-hole. Damn_registrars has no use for a butt-hole.
don't stand don't stand so close to me ......
The accusations fly
Its no use, he sees her
He starts to shake and cough
Just like the old man in
That book by nabakov ...
Dont stand, dont stand so
Dont stand so close to me
"The hands that help are better far than lips that pray." - Robert Ingersoll (1833-1899)
then they wouldnt be spare cpu cycles then, would they?
and with processor frequency scaling, i admittedly have even less of these "spare" cycles to spare.
wouldnt it make more sense to use ACPI to power off my pc when im not using it? id be donating spare kw/hr's to research labs in the area. not to mention a bit of spare bandwidth.
Good people go to bed earlier.
Shot of a Prius with a monster-truck lift kit,
driven by some hayseed from Appalachia,
head and arm sticking out the window,
coming down a huge hill to pick up speed,
bearing down on cattle arranged along a riverbank,
hitting a ramp and sailing over the 'species barrier',
with a triumphant 'Woo hoo!'
Get thee glass eyes, and, like a scurvy politician, seem to see things thou dost not.--King Lear
I'd love to see a slashdot poll for how people misread this tile in their head..
Read it right
Peons Observed Jumping Species Barrier
Prisons Observed Jumping Species Barrier
Prons Observed Jumping Species Barrier
CowboyNeal Jumped My Barrier
One more step toward the titorian worldline!
we'll see if mccain gets elected and starts ww3 with russia (also looking probable)
As a potential lottery winner, I totally support tax cuts for the wealthy
Mutating in species jumps!
Dude, if you're married, you're paying more per lay than anyone.
I prefer rogues to imbeciles because they sometimes take a rest.
the article is in review right now..but will probably be in nature or science.
I heard the talk.
finito...will probably help alzheimers...
regards
It also looks a bit like "pr0n", which sometimes has extremely unrealistic (as in, not totally fat and ugly) lesbians in it.
This was originally suspected, then researched in the seventies to early eighties. Prions (or whatever undiscovered mini virus that causes them.) were first discovered and named at that time. They were first seen to be infective in a disease called Kuru in a tribe in New Guinea and was later linked to how they prepared their dead, as part of the ritual involved the women relatives of the deceased eating a piece of the deceased brain. Then they showed up in the UK (plaque forming encephalic disease called 'scrapie' in sheep, to animal protein in feed, feed to cow, MAD COW, cow to meatpacker, cow to beef, beef to hamburger, hamburger to humans) then later in the US: (researching a disproportionate ratio of Creutzfeldt-Jakob among families whom had a member who hunted to provide extra food on the table, researchers started testing the animals that these families were known to eat. It was found that in the southern states where it was a custom to fry and eat the brains of squirrels, 'mad squirrel' was in abundance in the wild squirrel population. and a plaque forming encephalic disease similar to scrapie and mad cow was common among the elk and deer populations throughout.
All Nature or the lab in question seems to be attempting to build up hype and fear mongering, and they are misrepresenting the actual research they have done as new and unique.
I can't actually tell atm which of the parties is responsible as the article is behind a "You need to pay for a subscription to read this article in full" barrier, I usually get my Nature mags at the library book sale for a quarter a piece.
-Magdalene --"there are 10 types of people in the world, those who read binary, and those who don't"