Publication Date:
1996-12-20
Description:
The fundamental event in prion diseases seems to be a conformational change in cellular prion protein (PrPC) whereby it is converted into the pathologic isoform PrPSc. In fatal familial insomnia (FFI), the protease-resistant fragment of PrPSc after deglycosylation has a size of 19 kilodaltons, whereas that from other inherited and sporadic prion diseases is 21 kilodaltons. Extracts from the brains of FFI patients transmitted disease to transgenic mice expressing a chimeric human-mouse PrP gene about 200 days after inoculation and induced formation of the 19-kilodalton PrPSc fragment, whereas extracts from the brains of familial and sporadic Creutzfeldt-Jakob disease patients produced the 21-kilodalton PrPSc fragment in these mice. The results presented indicate that the conformation of PrPSc functions as a template in directing the formation of nascent PrPSc and suggest a mechanism to explain strains of prions where diversity is encrypted in the conformation of PrPSc.〈br /〉〈span class="detail_caption"〉Notes: 〈/span〉Telling, G C -- Parchi, P -- DeArmond, S J -- Cortelli, P -- Montagna, P -- Gabizon, R -- Mastrianni, J -- Lugaresi, E -- Gambetti, P -- Prusiner, S B -- NS07219/NS/NINDS NIH HHS/ -- New York, N.Y. -- Science. 1996 Dec 20;274(5295):2079-82.〈br /〉〈span class="detail_caption"〉Author address: 〈/span〉Department of Neurology, University of California, San Francisco, CA 94143, USA.〈br /〉〈span class="detail_caption"〉Record origin:〈/span〉 〈a href="http://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pubmed/8953038" target="_blank"〉PubMed〈/a〉
Keywords:
Animals
;
Brain/*pathology
;
*Brain Chemistry
;
Creutzfeldt-Jakob Syndrome/metabolism/pathology
;
Humans
;
Mice
;
Mice, Transgenic
;
PrPSc Proteins/analysis/*chemistry
;
Prion Diseases/*etiology/metabolism/pathology/transmission
;
Prions/*chemistry
;
*Protein Conformation
;
Protein Folding
;
Protein Structure, Secondary
;
Protein Structure, Tertiary
Print ISSN:
0036-8075
Electronic ISSN:
1095-9203
Topics:
Biology
,
Chemistry and Pharmacology
,
Computer Science
,
Medicine
,
Natural Sciences in General
,
Physics
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