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> cooking temperatures are not nearly high enough to kill prions Are prions alive in that sense? Can you kill a protein?
by markbnj 7y ago
> cooking temperatures are not nearly high enough to kill prions
Are prions alive in that sense? Can you kill a protein?
- tedunangst 7y agoKill, deactivate, denature, disable capacity for reproduction, whatever.
- irrational 7y agoI've read that sterilizing surgical equipment will not remove human prions from the equipment, so they can be passed on to the next person that is operated on by that equipment. Apparently they are nearly impossible to remove without destroying the equipment.
- b_tterc_p 7y agoNo. They’re basically misfolded proteins that tend to cause other proteins they touch to become similarly misfolded through mechanisms we don’t well understand (or at least, I don’t understand). They’re not alive. You can denature them, which more or less means destroying them. But destroying things tends to be harder than killing things.