Biology Newsfeed

Another Neurodegenerative Disease Linked To a Prion

Slashdot: Science - Fetched: September 4th, 2015, 5:00am UTC

MTorrice writes: A new study concludes that a brain protein causes the rare, Parkinson's-like disease called multiple systems atrophy (MSA) by acting like a prion, the misbehaving type of protein infamously linked to mad cow disease. The researchers say the results are the most definitive demonstration to date that proteins involved in many neurodegenerative disorders, such as Alzheimer's and Parkinson's, exhibit prion-like behavior: They can misfold into shapes that then coax others to do the same, leading to protein aggregation that forms neurotoxic clumps. If these other diseases are caused by prion-like proteins, then scientists could develop treatments that slow or stop disease progression by designing molecules that block prion propagation.pdiv class="share_submission" style="position:relative;" a class="slashpop" href="http://twitter.com/home?status=Another+Neurodegenerative+Disease+Linked+To+a+Prion%3A+http%3A%2F%2Fbit.ly%2F1NQtieP"img src="http://a.fsdn.com/sd/twitter_icon_large.png"/a a class="slashpop" href="http://www.facebook.com/sharer.php?u=http%3A%2F%2Fscience.slashdot.org%2Fstory%2F15%2F09%2F04%2F004234%2Fanother-neurodegenerative-disease-linked-to-a-prion%3Futm_source%3Dslashdot%26utm_medium%3Dfacebook"img src="http://a.fsdn.com/sd/facebook_icon_large.png"/a a class="nobg" href="http://plus.google.com/share?url=http://science.slashdot.org/story/15/09/04/004234/another-neurodegenerative-disease-linked-to-a-prion?utm_source=slashdotamp;utm_medium=googleplus" onclick="javascript:window.open(this.href,'', 'menubar=no,toolbar=no,resizable=yes,scrollbars=yes,height=600,width=600');return false;"img src="http://www.gstatic.com/images/icons/gplus-16.png" alt="Share on Google+"//a /div/ppa href="http://science.slashdot.org/story/15/09/04/004234/another-neurodegenerative-disease-linked-to-a-prion?utm_source=rss1.0moreanonamp;utm_medium=feed"Read more of this story/a at Slashdot./pimg src="http://feeds.feedburner.com/~r/Slashdot/slashdotScience/~4/A-sgTuR1rHc" height="1" width="1" alt=""/

Read more

Return to the Newsfeed