BIOS 277: Prions in Health & Disease

Course Description

Prions consist of misfolded, polymerized proteins and are agents of transmissible neurodegenerative diseases such as bovine spongiform encephalopathy and Creutzfeldt-Jakob disease of man. However, "prion-like" polymerization of proteins is a more general phenomenon involved in a long-term memory, innate immunity and most likely other important functions. In microbes, prions are non0Mendelian genetic elements. The course will emphasize that "prion-like" polymerization is part of a more general allosteric regulation of gene expression that can sometimes go wrong, as in Alzheimer's and Parkinson's diseases, and only exceptionally may cause transmissible infectious disease that spread in the population.