The shape of things to come: structural insights into how prion proteins encipher heritable information
Glenn C. Telling
Abstract
The prion hypothesis embodies the radical concept that prion proteins contain the necessary information for infectious replication within their shape, thus obviating the requirement for genomic material. Two elegant papers by Hoyt et al. and Manka et al. describing high-resolution structures of infectious prions bring us closer to answering the long-standing question of how different prion conformations produce heritably distinct diseases.
Topics & Concepts
Prion proteinComputational biologyBiologyFungal prionPrion ProteinsGeneticsGenePhenotypeMedicineDiseasePathologyPrion Diseases and Protein MisfoldingNeurological diseases and metabolismTrace Elements in Health