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It's actually relatively simple. Proteins, very roughly speaking, are things that change other things into something we need. You could think of proteins requir

It's actually relatively simple. Proteins, very roughly speaking, are things that change other things into something we need. You could think of proteins required for breaking down sugar, which do more or less exactly that: they take a molecule of sugar, break a part off of it and hand it to the next protein in the chain. What makes prions so weird is that they are a protein that has been mismade (misfolded, generally). That something is being made broken isn't that weird in biology. Mostly, the body degrades them pretty quickly. However, prions, while not being able to do what they're meant to do, can take well-made versions of itself and break them in the same manner.

ryanmercer 8y ago
>What makes prions so weird is that they are a protein that has been mismade (misfolded, generally). And science doesn't know how they get misfolded in the first place then they basically go "hey other protein, boop you're like me now, let's burn this mother to the ground" and then you get something similar to the 'corrupted blood incident' https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Corrupted_Blood_incident https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Corrupted_Blood_incident except you lose your mind and die. As far as saying we know how proteins misfold, I'm going purely by what I've read both on and on wikipedia as I'm not an expert in proteins and amino acids... >It is not known what causes the normal protein to misfold Second sentence of: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Prion https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Prion
- Balero 8y ago
  There are plenty of ways that a protein could be mis-folded. There is a lot of bumpiness in a cell (though this is unlikely to lead to this). A random mutation (through some sort of radiation) could change a piece of DNA or RNA, causing the protein to be made incorrectly. All of these are frighteningly unlikely. But happen so often they are almost certain to do so in a large enough time, with a large enough population. The similarities to the 'corrupted blood incident' start and end with them both spreading to others in a local area. Prions don't really suggest that life is a simulation.
  - jerf 8y ago
    "Prions don't really suggest that life is a simulation." If life is a simulation, prions suggest either the simulation is run at an extremely high degree of verisimilitude, indeed simulating QM at a particle level for living things, or that the simulator has an incredible desire for accuracy, and has put a lot of non-trivial work into ensuring it. Almost anything you can think of that would reduce the computational load for simulating a human being would eliminate the possibility of prions arising in the first place, since "protein folding" is one of the first things you'd want to get rid of to cut the load down.
    - ryanmercer 8y ago
      >If life is a simulation, prions suggest either the simulation is run at an extremely high degree of verisimilitude, indeed simulating QM at a particle level for living things, or that the simulator has an incredible desire for accuracy, These are both somewhat my logic for even believing we live in a simulation. Obviously humans seem to be the largest factor on Earth given how we are rapidly changing the planet and directly, and indirectly, affecting all life on the planet. We already have things like folding@home, weather modelling, climate modelling, asteroids@home, cosmology simulations from universe sandbox to supercomputer level, etc etc so on and so forth. People love to immediately dismiss a simulation hypothesis "stuff is too detailed!" "why would someone use such specificity!". Well, why would anyone watch the Kardashians or eat hair (Trichophagia) or smoke cigarettes because none of these things are rational... however having a highly detailed simulation has all sorts of potential applications from seeing how ancestors may have evolved to seeing how a designer organism might potentially play out on a sterile world you plan to seed to being someone's incredible version of the Sims. I mean, WE have the desire to do this sort of stuff. The above mentioned distributed computing and supercomputer applications shows some level of desire for this sort of thing but then you have games like SimLife from 1992 that allowed players to simulate an ecosystem and to modify the genetics of the plants and animals in the game. 'Junk' DNA, prions, viruses, erm consciousness, burning fossil fuels to the tune of roughly 40 gigatons of carbon dioxide emissions this year, living in coastal cities at or below sea level even AFTER disasters do considerable damage, the rapid adoption of social media and reality television, all of these things seriously make me wonder if we in fact are some sort of simulation just to see how a species can deal with both environmental and self-caused disasters. Throw in many other things like the fact we've not detected life off-world, we've yet to detect any signs of another intelligent species (mind you we're just starting to really look), the rapid advances we've made in technology just in the 33 years of my life, technology allowing for us to fake audio and video of people that enough reference data exists for and things like this Chinese virtual news anchor, etc and it becomes really easy to go "huh, maybe we DO live in a simulation".
- triviatise 8y ago
  Proteins fold based on minimizing energy states. Any amino acid sequence (large molecules) can be folded in many different ways. For example enzymes binding to proteins can cause desired protein folding changes. Generally if a protein gets misfolded (happens all the time) it doesnt do anything, in some cases misfolding causes bad effects. Prions misfold in a way that induces other of the normal version to misfold in the same way and therefore spread. On the plus side prions kills pretty quickly and so there is unlikely to be much underlying mutation in their form or function. Protein folding is incredibly complicated but I could imagine enzymes which could snip the prion or another similar protein which induces it to fold back into the preferred state. I doubt we have the science to explicitly design such a thing, but you could expose prion molecules in bacteria and put them under evolutionary pressure and they might eventually develop something that disables/fixes the prion. You would essentially align survival of the bacteria to disruption of the prion molecule. This link has an image of the two versions https://www.mayoclinic.org/diseases-conditions/creutzfeldt-jakob-disease/multimedia/normal-and-diseased-prions/img-20007478 https://www.mayoclinic.org/diseases-conditions/creutzfeldt-j...

ryanmercer 8y ago

>What makes prions so weird is that they are a protein that has been mismade (misfolded, generally). And science doesn't know how they get misfolded in the first place then they basically go "hey other protein, boop you're like me now, let's burn this mother to the ground" and then you get something similar to the 'corrupted blood incident' https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Corrupted_Blood_incident https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Corrupted_Blood_incident except you lose your mind and die. As far as saying we know how proteins misfold, I'm going purely by what I've read both on and on wikipedia as I'm not an expert in proteins and amino acids... >It is not known what causes the normal protein to misfold Second sentence of: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Prion https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Prion

Balero 8y ago
There are plenty of ways that a protein could be mis-folded. There is a lot of bumpiness in a cell (though this is unlikely to lead to this). A random mutation (through some sort of radiation) could change a piece of DNA or RNA, causing the protein to be made incorrectly. All of these are frighteningly unlikely. But happen so often they are almost certain to do so in a large enough time, with a large enough population. The similarities to the 'corrupted blood incident' start and end with them both spreading to others in a local area. Prions don't really suggest that life is a simulation.
- jerf 8y ago
  "Prions don't really suggest that life is a simulation." If life is a simulation, prions suggest either the simulation is run at an extremely high degree of verisimilitude, indeed simulating QM at a particle level for living things, or that the simulator has an incredible desire for accuracy, and has put a lot of non-trivial work into ensuring it. Almost anything you can think of that would reduce the computational load for simulating a human being would eliminate the possibility of prions arising in the first place, since "protein folding" is one of the first things you'd want to get rid of to cut the load down.
  - ryanmercer 8y ago
    >If life is a simulation, prions suggest either the simulation is run at an extremely high degree of verisimilitude, indeed simulating QM at a particle level for living things, or that the simulator has an incredible desire for accuracy, These are both somewhat my logic for even believing we live in a simulation. Obviously humans seem to be the largest factor on Earth given how we are rapidly changing the planet and directly, and indirectly, affecting all life on the planet. We already have things like folding@home, weather modelling, climate modelling, asteroids@home, cosmology simulations from universe sandbox to supercomputer level, etc etc so on and so forth. People love to immediately dismiss a simulation hypothesis "stuff is too detailed!" "why would someone use such specificity!". Well, why would anyone watch the Kardashians or eat hair (Trichophagia) or smoke cigarettes because none of these things are rational... however having a highly detailed simulation has all sorts of potential applications from seeing how ancestors may have evolved to seeing how a designer organism might potentially play out on a sterile world you plan to seed to being someone's incredible version of the Sims. I mean, WE have the desire to do this sort of stuff. The above mentioned distributed computing and supercomputer applications shows some level of desire for this sort of thing but then you have games like SimLife from 1992 that allowed players to simulate an ecosystem and to modify the genetics of the plants and animals in the game. 'Junk' DNA, prions, viruses, erm consciousness, burning fossil fuels to the tune of roughly 40 gigatons of carbon dioxide emissions this year, living in coastal cities at or below sea level even AFTER disasters do considerable damage, the rapid adoption of social media and reality television, all of these things seriously make me wonder if we in fact are some sort of simulation just to see how a species can deal with both environmental and self-caused disasters. Throw in many other things like the fact we've not detected life off-world, we've yet to detect any signs of another intelligent species (mind you we're just starting to really look), the rapid advances we've made in technology just in the 33 years of my life, technology allowing for us to fake audio and video of people that enough reference data exists for and things like this Chinese virtual news anchor, etc and it becomes really easy to go "huh, maybe we DO live in a simulation".
triviatise 8y ago
Proteins fold based on minimizing energy states. Any amino acid sequence (large molecules) can be folded in many different ways. For example enzymes binding to proteins can cause desired protein folding changes. Generally if a protein gets misfolded (happens all the time) it doesnt do anything, in some cases misfolding causes bad effects. Prions misfold in a way that induces other of the normal version to misfold in the same way and therefore spread. On the plus side prions kills pretty quickly and so there is unlikely to be much underlying mutation in their form or function. Protein folding is incredibly complicated but I could imagine enzymes which could snip the prion or another similar protein which induces it to fold back into the preferred state. I doubt we have the science to explicitly design such a thing, but you could expose prion molecules in bacteria and put them under evolutionary pressure and they might eventually develop something that disables/fixes the prion. You would essentially align survival of the bacteria to disruption of the prion molecule. This link has an image of the two versions https://www.mayoclinic.org/diseases-conditions/creutzfeldt-jakob-disease/multimedia/normal-and-diseased-prions/img-20007478 https://www.mayoclinic.org/diseases-conditions/creutzfeldt-j...