PRION diseases such as BSE and variant Creutzfeldt-Jakob disease (vCJD) just got more complicated.
These diseases destroy the brain when a wrongly folded version of a prion protein called PrP begins converting normal PrP – which usually protects the brain – into the misfolded variety. Researchers had suspected that other types of prion might exist in the brain, but none had ever been identified – until now.
Joel Watts from the University of Toronto in Canada and his colleagues have identified a prion in mouse brains that they call “Shadoo”, which shares structural similarities with a key region of the healthy version of…
