Health

Prions May Give Evolutionary Advantage

by Barbara McPherson | April 5, 2009 at 08:33 am

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Prions are the proteins that cause several diseases in animals. For unknown reasons, some proteins, which are 3D constructs, seem to turn inside out and cause normal proteins to do the same, leading to disease.
In recent years many diseases have been identified as having a prion cause -- Kuru and KJnv in humans, scrapie in sheep and goats, BSE in bovines and wasting disease in deer and elk. These disease prions all cause brain wasting and eventually death. There is no treatment and no cure.
Since the isolation of the causative factor in Bovine Spongiform Encephalopathy, and the discovery that the bovine prions can cause disease in humans, major changes have taken place in the slaughter industry.
It seemed as if any prion was a bad prion. But news coming from from scientists indicate that prions help organisms survive during tough environmental times. The work is in its early stages and the researchers are currently working on yeast cells.

"We think prions are really important," says co-author Simon Alberti of the Whitehead Institute for Biomedical Research in Cambridge, Massachusetts. "When environmental conditions are harsh, they might allow a species to survive."

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Yuliya Talmazan

at 10:08 on April 5th, 2009

Thanks for this post, Barbara McPherson. Prions are indeed an enigmatic aspect of modern biology. The discovery that they can confer an evolutionary advantage to the species that bear them is truly intriguing. It will be interesting to see where the research goes from here.