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Prions: Beyond a Single Protein
- Source :
- Clinical Microbiology Reviews. 29:633-658
- Publication Year :
- 2016
- Publisher :
- American Society for Microbiology, 2016.
-
Abstract
- SUMMARY Since the term protein was first coined in 1838 and protein was discovered to be the essential component of fibrin and albumin, all cellular proteins were presumed to play beneficial roles in plants and mammals. However, in 1967, Griffith proposed that proteins could be infectious pathogens and postulated their involvement in scrapie, a universally fatal transmissible spongiform encephalopathy in goats and sheep. Nevertheless, this novel hypothesis had not been evidenced until 1982, when Prusiner and coworkers purified infectious particles from scrapie-infected hamster brains and demonstrated that they consisted of a specific protein that he called a “prion.” Unprecedentedly, the infectious prion pathogen is actually derived from its endogenous cellular form in the central nervous system. Unlike other infectious agents, such as bacteria, viruses, and fungi, prions do not contain genetic materials such as DNA or RNA. The unique traits and genetic information of prions are believed to be encoded within the conformational structure and posttranslational modifications of the proteins. Remarkably, prion-like behavior has been recently observed in other cellular proteins—not only in pathogenic roles but also serving physiological functions. The significance of these fascinating developments in prion biology is far beyond the scope of a single cellular protein and its related disease.
- Subjects :
- 0301 basic medicine
Microbiology (medical)
Prions
Epidemiology
animal diseases
Reviews
Hamster
Scrapie
Prion Proteins
03 medical and health sciences
chemistry.chemical_compound
medicine
Animals
Humans
Pathogen
Gene
Genetics
Transmissible spongiform encephalopathy
General Immunology and Microbiology
biology
business.industry
Public Health, Environmental and Occupational Health
RNA
medicine.disease
biology.organism_classification
030104 developmental biology
Infectious Diseases
chemistry
business
Bacteria
DNA
Subjects
Details
- ISSN :
- 10986618 and 08938512
- Volume :
- 29
- Database :
- OpenAIRE
- Journal :
- Clinical Microbiology Reviews
- Accession number :
- edsair.doi.dedup.....301bdd1a8dfef6c7b1a81b8c31b3ebf7
- Full Text :
- https://doi.org/10.1128/cmr.00046-15