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:Folding@Home

[ozphx]

Instead of donating energy to run Folding on your inefficient PC, where the results have to be triple-checked - consider just donating money directly to the project instead of via your power bill.

Runtime on a trusted supercomputer / local cluster is going to be an order of magnitude more efficient in terms of data crunched per watt-hour.

While troubling, also cool.

[fuzzyfuzzyfungus]

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.

Re:Scary

[rrohbeck]

I didn't realize this, but it appears that a lot of prion diseases are fairly recent developments.

People didn't eat as much meat as they do today, didn't live as long, and they certainly didn't feed their livestock with slaughterhouse waste. The latter is what got prions into the food chain in significant amounts.