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."

Comments

Re:comparison

[Anonymous Coward]

Mods, note that the parent post is NOT offtopic. It's talking about mad cows.

Re:Folding@Home

[maglor_83]

Your email isn't shown publicly, so I have decided to reply instead.
There is a very insightful comment here

Prof. X got a name for them

[jsse]

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"

Re:While troubling, also cool.

[oldhack]

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.

Your name is not "Murphy" by any chance?