Almost two decades have passed since Stanley Prusiner proposed that the transmissible agent causing spongiform encephalopathies consists of a misfolded protein — but the biology of prion ...

A prime example of proteins that catalyze their own conformational change into the toxic form is the prion proteins ... to the prevention of protein misfolding. Despite chaperone actions, some ...

They can be genetic, sporadic—without known cause—or acquired, in which exposure to abnormal prion protein induces misfolding of the host’s own normal prion proteins. While prion disorders like ...

also called Creutzfeldt-Jakob disease (CJD), results from the misfolding of a normal prion protein—an essential protein ...

According to Science, CJD is the most common prion disease in humans. Prions are infectious misfolded proteins that cause other proteins to misfold and aggregate in the brain. The US Centers for ...

The findings are published in the journal BMC Cancer. In the study, the team discovered that the prion protein plays a key ...