First Glimpse at Infectious Prion Shape

The preliminary structure of the misfolded protein that causes mad cow disease and Creutzfeldt-Jakob disease looks like a coiled mattress spring.

Written byAbby Olena, PhD

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Researchers piece together the preliminary structure of the prion that causes mad cow disease Molecular architecture of an infectious mammalian prion.IMAGE CREDIT: ESTER VAZQUEZ-FERNANDEZ, HOWARD YOUNG, HOLGER WILLE, JESUS REQUENA

Mammalian prions are notoriously difficult as structural biology subjects, given their insolubility and tendency to aggregate. Researchers have now overcome these challenges to figure out the preliminary structure of a shortened form of infectious prion (PrP^Sc), which they report today (September 8) in PLOS Pathogens.

“For the first time, we have a structure of an infectious mammalian prion,” said Giuseppe Legname of Scuola Internazionale Superiore di Studi Avanzati in Trieste, Italy, who was not involved in this study. “It’s a very important paper,” he added.

“What we have done is to obtain a very simple, very preliminary idea of what the structure of these mammalian prions are,” said study coauthor Jesús Requena of the University of Santiago de Compostela in Spain.

Requena and colleagues generated ...

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Meet the Author

Abby Olena, PhD
As a freelancer for The Scientist, Abby reports on new developments in life science for the website. She has a PhD from Vanderbilt University and got her start in science journalism as the Chicago Tribune’s AAAS Mass Media Fellow in 2013. Following a stint as an intern for The Scientist, Abby was a postdoc in science communication at Duke University, where she developed and taught courses to help scientists share their research. In addition to her work as a science journalist, she leads science writing and communication workshops and co-produces a conversational podcast. She is based in Alabama.
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