What Drove The Cow Mad? Lessons From A Tiny Fish - Clues To Understanding Prion Diseases

For over twenty years, scientists have known that a normal protein in the brain, PrP, or prion protein, can turn harmful and cause deadly illnesses like Creutzfeldt-Jakob disease (CJD) in humans, and bovine spongiform encephalopathy (BSE) in cattle. What they could not explain is why large amounts of this normal protein are produced by our bodies in the first place.

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Filed under: Biology on March 11th, 2009