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[maikeru]

Originally Posted by Michaelangelica

ScienceDaily: Prion Propagates In Foreign Host

Not sure what this means.

TSE and other prion diseases are sometimes transmissible between different species, as seen with the unfortunate BSE and vCJD syndromes in Europe. Prions, it seems, were transmitted through sheep (scrapies) --> cattle (BSE) --> and humans (vCJD) because of the similarity of the native brain protein in all of these species. To my understanding, animals which have PrP that is dissimilar enough to avoid the "misfolding" and "transmission" that BSE prion proteins can induce are either highly resistant to TSEs or immune to it, because their proteins cannot be "messed up" by the prion proteins from other species. (This doesn't mean that they are immune to their own prion diseases, though. It's just another example of the difficulty facing diseases when they try to jump the "species barrier.")

Now to tie the explanation above with your link, this is directly relevant to the research because scientists have replicated a similar cross-species transmission process in a favorite test organism, yeast, and another fungi. Yeast possess a protein similar to prion protein in animals and can suffer from some of the effects of TSE-like prion diseases, where their proteins misfold, clump, and cause malfunction in the organism. Being able to reproduce and study the transmission of prion diseases allows for greater understanding and future treatments, especially when we understand better how prions work in such a "simple" model organism as yeast. Scientists really like simple, cheap, understandable models for obvious reasons.

Here are some readings on prions:
chembytes e-zine 2002 - Prions show their metal (This is an old article, but I used it when I wrote a paper on BSE about 3 years ago for a virology and diseases class. I think it's pretty good.)
Prion - Wikipedia, the free encyclopedia (Of course, Wiki to the rescue!)

If any of my information is not correct or is out-of-date, please forgive me... It's been a couple years since I looked prions and TSEs over in some detail.