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

Corrected article link

[damn_registrars]

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.

Re:comparison

[Anonymous Coward]

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

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.

Re:Folding@Home

[narcberry]

It's like every /. article is an opportunity to espouse the same posts in a previous article. Let me save all the future posters their breathe...

Dirty energy is bad.
Global Warming.
Creationists are dumb.
DMCA is stoopid.
OMG zero day is here!

There, someone e-mail me when there's a comment worth reading.

The bigger story

[Anonymous Coward]

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!

Re:Folding@Home

[g0dsp33d]

Or do both. I think they'll be glad for any CPU and especially any GPU cycles.

Oh No!

[Anonymous Coward]

That's nothing. I have peons swarming my village.

Help feed a hungry test tube.

[Ostracus]

"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?

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:While troubling, also cool.

[jd]

Prions appear to exist in a space somewhere between crystals (they "multiply" in a way mot dissimilar to crystals growing and do not make anything "new" the way a virus would) and the lower end of what is considered "true" life. This suggests to me that there is a continuum and that the terms "living" and "non-living" are not descriptive of anything fundamental. If that is correct, then I suspect we will find that prions were an important stage in getting to what we call "life". However, it is not obvious as to how you'd get from a free-floating RNA/DNA strand and a prion to a living cell, so there must be other stages in between, if that indeed was the sequence. I suspect that a study of prions could yield such an additional step, but only if the researchers are willing to accept such a stage could exist.

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?

Re:While troubling, also cool.

[Hal_Porter]

Have you heard of Cairn's-Smith's clay theory of abiogenesis

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Graham_Cairns-Smith#Clay_theory
In simplified form, clay theory runs as follows: Clays form naturally from silicates in solution. Clay crystals, as other crystals, preserve their external formal arrangement as they grow, snap and grow further. Masses of clay crystals of a particular external form may happen to affect their environment in ways which affect their chances of further replication â" for example, a 'stickier' clay crystal is more likely to silt a stream bed, creating an environment conducive to further sedimentation. It is conceivable that such effects could extend to the creation of flat areas likely to be exposed to air, dry and turn to wind-borne dust, which could fall at random in other streams. Thus by simple, inorganic, physical processes, a selection environment might exist for the reproduction of clay crystals of the 'stickier' shape.

There follows a process of natural selection for clay crystals which trap certain forms of molecules to their surfaces (those which enhance their replication potential). Quite complex proto-organic molecules can be catalysed by the surface properties of silicates. The final step occurs when these complex molecules perform a 'Genetic Takeover' from their clay 'vehicle', becoming an independent locus of replication - an evolutionary moment that might be understood as the first exaptation.

Richard Dawkins said of this that he doesn't believe this particular theory of abiogenesis but something like this must have happened.

He memorably said that one day a robot equivalent of Cairns Smith may note wryly that silicon based machines like him eventually took over from carbon based life like us that built them as tools in the same way that carbon based replicators took over from silicon based clay lifeforms that built them as tools.

Re:While troubling, also cool.

[rve]

These prions are single molecules that have a harmful effect on the host. I believe the word 'toxin' is a better description.

Prions don't self replicate, it's a substance that catalyzes (speeds up) the reaction of refolding an existing protein into another shape, not the formation of a protein out of other substances. If it catalyzed a different kind of reaction, you'd call it a toxic enzyme, not something on the continuum of life.

Re:While troubling, also cool.

[lgw]

That's the best description I've heard so far. Bad prions are a particulary nasty biological toxin because they can survive conditions that destroy other biological toxins. They can apparantly pass through digestion repeatedly, aren't destroyed by an ordinary autoclave, and survive for a long time exposed to sun and oxygen. It's apparantly hard to sterilize medical equipment in such a way that prions are destroyed.

The good news is that prion-based diseases are vanishingly rare. Avoid cannibalism and you're safe: so far meteor strikes are about as dangerous a threat, along with heart-attack induced by the stress of winning the lottery.

Re:While troubling, also cool.

[julesh]

The good news is that prion-based diseases are vanishingly rare. Avoid cannibalism and you're safe: so far meteor strikes are about as dangerous a threat, along with heart-attack induced by the stress of winning the lottery.

Don't overestimate the threat of meteor strikes. While there have been a lot of near misses and property damage, there are apparently no recorded instances of somebody being killed by a meteorite since 1929.

Just so you know.

Re:While troubling, also cool.

[cartman]

Prions don't self replicate, it's a substance that catalyzes (speeds up) the reaction of refolding an existing protein into another shape...I believe the word 'toxin' is a better description.

You're mistaken. Prions self-replicate by inducing other proteins to fold into prions like themselves. Prions thereby replicate and increase their numbers exponentially until they damage the organism. When symptoms appear, this process of exponential growth is already 95% complete and the organism will soon be dead. At that point, the organism is much more infectious because the number of prions is far higher than originally.

Because prions replicate themselves, they bio-accumulate over time. Since organisms can "inherit" the prions of other organisms by ingesting them, the prions can accumulate across generations. Which means that you can feed cows to other cows continuously, and the number of prions in the cow population will increase over generations. It may take several generations of cow cannibalism before disease will become apparent.

The prion hypothesis was interesting precisely because it proposed a mechanism of replication and infectivity which was not based upon DNA or RNA.

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

Why is this news again?

[Anonymous Coward]

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.

Re:Why is this news again?

[Anonymous Coward]

i may have read the article wrong, but i'll give this a shot.

you're right that we know that prions from cows can cause problems in humans. but i think what the article said is that it creates a new kind of prion as well. so where there used to be just one mis-folded protein messing with you, now there are two mis-folded proteins messing with you, and each is mis-folded in a different way and can do a different thing to you. so while you used to just have apples, now you have apples and oranges to deal with. two different fruits, with two different tastes. and you have to think that for every one instance where they caught this, they missed ten other instances. thinking of it that way, this could be huge.

again, i haven't read the full article, and i may have read the synopsis wrong, but that's the impression i got out of it

Re:Rudimentary

[fahrbot-bot]

Considering that we force feed cows and chickens the meat bi-products of the industry.

That's been illegal in the U.S. for cows for many years. I'm not sure about the current law for chickens. From a 2003 USAToday article:

The United States and Canada in 1997 made it illegal to feed cows meat and bone meal made from ruminants. The feed bans in both countries do allow use of that feed for poultry and pigs.

The science of fear.

[Anonymous Coward]

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.

Ailment?

[ghoti]

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.

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:Folding@Home

[nospam007]

>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.

Problem is, there ain't no such thing on this planet.

From Wikipedia: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Folding@home

"On September 16, 2007, the Folding@home project officially attained a performance level higher than one petaFLOPS, becoming the first computing system of any kind to do so, although it had briefly peaked above one petaFLOPS in March 2007.[14][15]. In comparison, the fastest supercomputer in the world (as of June 2008, IBM's Roadrunner) peaks at 1.026 petaFLOPS[16]. In early May 2008 the project attained a sustained performance level higher than two petaFLOPS, again being the first computing system of any kind to do so. Now Folding@home computing cluster operates at above 2 petaFLOPS at all times, with a large majority of the performance coming from PlayStation 3 and GPU clients.[2] On August 20, 2008, the Folding@home project broke the three petaFLOPS milestone, once again being the first computing project of any kind in history to ever do so.[2]"

Been known for quit some time

[transporter_ii]

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

Re:Been known for quit some time

[tloh]

mod parent up. I did some reading last year on Cronic Wasting Disease (CWD was mentioned in the article) for my infectious disease class and examples like the outbreak at the mink farm just mentioned was very prevalent in available literature. I think most people are getting the wrong idea because the article is badly written for a non-technical audience. The novelty seems *not* to be that prions can cause cross-species infections, but that it has been demonstrated in vitro (by way of "protein misfolding cyclic amplification (PMCA) protocol") in such a way that elucidated some details (multiple forms as revealed by novel strain properties) that were not apparent before. This is interesting *not* because it is a ground breaking new discovery, but because it serves as a starting point for further studying cross-species prion interaction from a different perspective using different techniques.

Re:Been known for quit some time

[julesh]

Uhuh. The summary is just wrong, is what's going on here. If you read the article, what it's actually about is a new way to study prions in vitro and test them to determine whether there's a possibility of them crossing a particular species barrier.

Which is, when you think about it, a very useful test to have available.

Re:Folding@Home

[RickRussellTX]

Depends on when you run it. Coal plants burn more coal at night than they need for electricity to keep the furnaces hot for peak usage periods. If you run F@H between 9PM and 6AM, you're actually not having much impact on fossil fuel use, pollution or carbon footprint.

That's why electric utilities and some companies are developing programs to make the best use of off-peak power. Electric cars, for example, are exciting because they could engage timers that charge them only during off-peak.

F@H could do the same in principle, with a check-box to run only during late hours. I don't know if they have that feature now.

Scary

[Pedrito]

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.

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.

Re:Scary

[registrar]

Smallpox had been around for thousands of years, but it was only in the last few centuries that people identified it as being distinct from chickenpox, measles and other poxes. It doesn't prove that there's been a proliferation of poxes, just a lot more classifying going on.

That said, our changing living patterns do expose us to new diseases (see sibling post) like BSE, SARS and HIV---all depending on who you mean by "us". There's truth in what you observe, but it's not a huge deal because that same change in living patterns means that we know what caused it and what to do about it. Life expectancy has gone up dramatically despite the introduction of new diseases.

Mark Purdey's alternative hypothesis

[nido]

... 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.

Re:Mark Purdey's alternative hypothesis

[timmarhy]

sounds like nonsense to me, just a crack pot theory piecing bits together combined with 1/2 truths.

Re:Mark Purdey's alternative hypothesis

[Reziac]

Yes, but now I'm wondering... DNA can be damaged/mutated by environmental factors; proteins can be damaged by chemicals (when I was in college, we used the crude method of boiling proteins in a saturated lye solution to break them down into their various amino acids); why should prions be immune?

Which says nothing pro or con re this Purdey fellow's theory of the origin of BSE; he could be dead-wrong on that, yet correct as applied elsewhere. Or he may be completely off-base in every way, yet we should still look at *what* causes prions to "fold wrong"; who knows what we'll learn?

Re:Mark Purdey's alternative hypothesis

[tfoss]

Purdey's theory is that prions are an effect of environmental poisoning, not the cause of Mad-Cow-esque disease.

First off, those two statements are unrelated. Prions can cause TSEs regardless of if copper or manganese from the environment causes them. Secondly, it is pretty well accepted by the scientific community that prions are the cause of TSEs. You can infect animals with PrP-Sc (the misfolded form of the prion protein (PrP-C being the normally folded version) and cause TSE. If you knock out the PrP protein, mice are not susceptible to PrP-Sc.

What causes the first misfolding of PrP-C to PrP-Sc is unknown (unfortunately), and it is clear that PrP-C has copper-binding repeats, so an effect of Cu on the protein is a very likely possibility.

-Ted

Re:Rudimentary

[retech]

[sarcasm]I'm sure there are plenty of inspectors to enforce that law as well.[/sarcasm]

Mad cow disease, just so you understand it, is prion based. It does not just randomly happen. It is impossible for the brain to just make up prions. It must first come in contact with them by consumption or injection. Considering the fact that no one goes around injecting the bovine population with syringes filled with prions we must conclude a cow get's them by ingestion. That would mean that a "mad cow" infected animal got that why be eating the brain or spinal tissue of another MAMMAL.

http://www.citizen.org/pressroom/release.cfm?ID=1629

http://www.organicconsumers.org/madcow/silence51104.cfm

http://www.goveg.com/ABD_madcow.asp

Re:cross species?

[Anonymous Coward]

rodent would be the genus, hamster would be the species.

Is that surprising ?

[aepervius]

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....).

Re:Folding@Home

[Hal_Porter]

It's like every /. article is an opportunity to espouse the same posts in a previous article. Let me save all the future posters their breathe...

Dirty energy is bad.
Global Warming.
Creationists are dumb.
DMCA is stoopid.
OMG zero day is here!

There, someone e-mail me when there's a comment worth reading.

I think there's some inherent vulnerability of internet discussion sites to virulent memes. If you look at Digg at the moment it's got to the point where 50% of the stories on the front page are some dubious looking slur on Palin. A few months ago 50% of them where dubious looking slurs on Hilary. And a few months before that they were all posts containing that 09 F9 magic key. 4chan is plagued by self replicating javascripts because it doesn't have a CAPTCHA, but digg and slashdot get a different sort of replicator, one which needs human interaction to spread.

It's like someone posts a meme, people mod/digg it up, there is a backlash, then more people digg it up and post it. People that disagree are eventually forced out. Eventually the meme uses up 50% of the bandwidth.

Re:Rudimentary

[MicktheMech]

The GP wrote...

The United States and Canada in 1997 made it illegal to feed cows meat and bone meal made from ruminants. The feed bans in both countries do allow use of that feed for poultry and pigs.

Since both sheep and cows are ruminants, that would mean that they aren't fed to each other. At least sheep wouldn't be fed to cows, the quote doesn't state anything about sheep feed.

Folding@Home alternative

[vrjim]

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.

Re:Folding@Home alternative

[Weedlekin]

"Become a vegetarian and loose the risk of contracting a scary prion disease from your food."

The incidence of that scary prion disease in humans is extremely low. Even the the UK, where 400,000 infected cattle entered the food chain in the 1980s, has only had 193 cases (suspected and confirmed) over 25 years in a population of over 60 million people, and their figures are more accurate than anyone else's because they're the only country to have instituted mandatory reporting of cases with symptoms that even suggest the disease to a specialist government surveillance unit. To put that in context, the UK had well over a thousand confirmed deaths from salmonella alone during the same period, and the probability of significant under-reporting in these cases is very high indeed (the real incidence is estimated to be _at least_ double the reported incidence).

"No- I'm not a vegetarian, but I am seriously considering dropping all animals from my diet except birds and fish."

There are a wide variety of diseases that can be caught from eating birds and fish, especially if they're not properly cooked (fish and shellfish can for example give you hepatitus-A, and birds and their eggs are a common vector for salmonella). As the recent outbreaks of salmonella from spinach indicate, you're not safe eating vegetables either, so the only way of ensuring you don't get any fatal diseases from food is to avoid eating.

Re:Folding@Home alternative

[vrjim]

Since the incubation period in humans can be 50 years with an average 30 years (according to June 21, 2001 Wisconsin State Journal and some other sources I looked at) we likely have yet to see the extent of how many people were affected by the outbreak in the 80s. It's also easy to misdiagnose without proper testing- I imagine many doctors writing certain cases off as encephalitis or meningitis or a rapid onset of Alzheimer's (remember it sets in later in life due to the long incubation period) Yes, there are diseases you can get from vegetables, like salmonella, but unlike prion diseases you can destroy salmonella simply by cooking it. Prions aren't inactivated even by BOILING them. And though you can get Hepatitis A from consuming foods many of us have been vaccinated against it- not to mention the vast majority will fully recover from it in as little as 2 weeks with no permanent damage to the liver. Prion diseases on the other hand have no vaccine, no cure, and when they damage your brain you're damaged till death (which probably wont take much longer after).

Folding for Someone Else's Pocket

[SuperBanana]

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.

Re:Folding for Someone Else's Pocket

[julesh]

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.

The project is run by a non-profit company. Results are routinely made public. I don't see any reason to be concerned here.

Re:Folding for Someone Else's Pocket

[padre999]

Ever heard of world community grid?
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/World_Community_Grid#Outreach
"Also, as part of its commitment to improving human health and welfare, the results of all computations completed on World Community Grid are released into the public domain and made available to the scientific community."

Re:Rudimentary

[dubyrunning]

That's been illegal in the U.S. for cows for many years.

Not so. The FDA ban on feeding cattle protein to cattle excepts proteins derived from blood products and fat, and beef tallow is still used as a feed supplement at cattle farms. Also, since the bovine meat and bonemeal that used to be fed to cattle are still fed to other food stock like pigs and chickens - whose meal is, in turn, an accepted protein supplement for cattle - there is still a chance that infectious prions could find their way back into cattle (and us). Check out Michael Pollan's book, The Omnivore's Dilemma, for more info.

Re:Folding@Home

[poopdeville]

Or do all four: both, twice.

idle cpu?

[stm2]

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.

Rosetta @ home

[goombah99]

For this issue Rosetta at home (Boinc) might be a better choice for protein structure. It's already wokring on the prion problem.

"Prion diseases" not caused by prions

[SpringRevolt]

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)).

Re:Folding@Home

[colourmyeyes]

Where can I find parts/info on convection cooling a PC or server?

Re:Rudimentary

[daniel_newby]

... why prions are not broken down into amino acids during digestion, like all other proteins are

The prion form of the protein is resistant to the enzymes that normally break down proteins, which is why prions are a problem in the first place. Even then the digestive tract blocks large proteins out pretty well, but very rarely one makes it through to start a prion infection.

Re:Rudimentary

[magsk]

Though you are correct that cross feeding of downers has been illegal for years now... I worry that the large spike in feed prices (corn) will cause some struggling farmers to do things that they wouldnt normally do when feed prices had been lower....like feeding the chickens the downed cow from his neighbor.

Re:Folding@Home

[PopeRatzo]

People that disagree are eventually forced out

It's like the Republican convention, without the funny hats.

Re:Folding@Home

[jank1887]

oh, you're paying for it all right. we all are.