Prompting Prions

摘要

To test whether misfolded, disease-causing prion proteins could form from their normal counterparts without being seeded with the infectious form, biochemist Surachai Supat-tapone and his colleagues at Dartmouth Medical School in Hanover, NH, mixed a cocktail of purified, uninfectious prions, a synthetic, highly charged RNA, and some lipids. After stirring the concoction with sound waves, the normal proteins morphed into their lethal cousins and triggered scrapie-a fatal prion disease-when injected into hamsters.