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This will be necessary as prions have been proven to persist in the environment (plants that grow over the soil where deer with CWD decompose can transmit the d
by atleastoptimal 2y ago
This will be necessary as prions have been proven to persist in the environment (plants that grow over the soil where deer with CWD decompose can transmit the disease to animals that eat them).
Prions are both 100% fatal and virtually indestructible. It's like some sort of glitch universal kill-switch biology happened upon encoded by hell itself.
- j_bum 2y agoPrions: the final selfish g̶e̶n̶e̶ protein
- complaintdept 2y ago> plants that grow over the soil where deer with CWD decompose can transmit the disease to animals that eat them I've heard this before but the last I tried looking into it I could only find a single study with these findings. Do you know if this was ever replicated? If so, I'd be interested in reading it -- I have to wonder how careful the researchers were to isolate the raw plant material from the contaminated soil, which may have non-plant matter transmitting the prion. Plants transmitting a prion is just hard for me to believe.
- A_D_E_P_T 2y agoThat single study came out like six months ago: https://www.sciencedirect.com/science/article/pii/S2589004223025051 https://www.sciencedirect.com/science/article/pii/S258900422... It'll probably be a year or two until an attempt at replication is published. Anyway, the details are all there. It's an open-access paper. (I'm enjoying this new trend where almost everything worth reading is published in open-access journals.)
- flobosg 2y agoHere’s a study from 2015: https://www.sciencedirect.com/science/article/pii/S2211124715004374 https://www.sciencedirect.com/science/article/pii/S221112471...
- complaintdept 2y agoThanks, sibling to this comment posted the one I was thinking of. The study you posted appears to confirm their findings. This is...alarming.
- thinkfaster 2y ago[dead]
- beambot 2y agoPrions are the ice-nine of biology...
- vaylian 2y agoSounds like you are making a reference. Can you link to an explanation?
- bell-cot 2y agohttps://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Ice-nine https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Ice-nine
- dudeinjapan 2y agohttps://youtu.be/moSFlvxnbgk?si=oySyULUikorE8Gj_ https://youtu.be/moSFlvxnbgk?si=oySyULUikorE8Gj_
- jcul 2y agoGreat analogy, and one of my favorite books, of which I'm due a re-read, thanks for the reminder.
- teeray 2y agoBiological strangelets
- Thorrez 2y agoThis new treatment disables a gene that creates prions. It doesn't help you against prions from the environment.
- amluto 2y agoIf the treatment works, it should work against acquired prions. Acquired prions are dangerous because even a minute amount that makes it to susceptible tissue (the brain) can convert endogenous prion protein to the dangerous, misfolded form. If the treatment successfully turns off production of endogenous prion protein, then there won’t be any there to convert, and the disease (theoretically) won’t progress, and there’s some reason to believe that it might even reverse itself to at least some extent.
- Enginerrrd 2y ago>If the treatment successfully turns off production of endogenous prion protein, then there won’t be any there to convert, and the disease (theoretically) won’t progress Yeah that's true, but given how ubiquitous PRNP is in mammals, this could also produce some form of memory, cognitive, or other deficit.
- Thorrez 2y agoHmm, interesting. I wonder why the article doesn't mention that possibility.
- TeMPOraL 2y ago> It's like some sort of glitch universal kill-switch biology happened upon encoded by hell itself. Proving once again, that true Eldritch horrors are not out there, but right here; not in the cosmos, but in microcosm. Nature is the ancient mad god, and it's not the telescope but the microscope that will take away your sanity.
- roenxi 2y ago> ... Prions are both 100% fatal... I'd bet they aren't. Fatal once visible symptoms are present, probably. COVID had a CFR that was beyond horrible while the only cases that they were tracking were the ones that had made it to hospital. 100% CFR is certainly possible, but unless we have cheap ways of measuring prevalence it seems improbable. There could be common prion diseases that have managed to fly under the radar so far.
- ch4s3 2y agoI think the underlying biology here is pretty well known. They bump around in your body causing proteins to misfold which cascades as badly folded proteins bump into other proteins and cause misfolding. This eventually kills you, because there's no immune mechanism to purge misfolded proteins or to correct them.
- Enginerrrd 2y agoYes, but there's quite a bit of variation in how susceptible an individual's PrP is (genetic variation) to a particular strain of prion. That matters a LOT in terms of likelihood of getting infected, and duration of disease progression.
- flobosg 2y agohttps://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_human_disease_case_fatality_rates#:~:text=Transmissible%20spongiform%20encephalopathy https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_human_disease_case_fat...
- roenxi 2y agoInterpreting one-link comments is an excercise in creativity, but making some guesses: 1) You didn't check the source for the CFR. Wikipedia links an article that doesn't mention CFR or even use the word fatal. And as recently as '08 they were discovering that what they thought was one disease is actually 2. 2) I just wrote a comment explaining why a 100% CFR would be precise but likely not accurate. In case you thought it was, take a moment to reflect that linking to a table where the CFR is 100% isn't a refutation. That number is probably precise but likely not accurate. We don't seem to be good at detecting "mild" prion diseases. 3) Even if by some miracle that table is accurate and precise ... that is one disease. If you want to bet that prions only cause one disease then you're welcome to - but I'm still willing to bet that there are other prion diseases to be discovered that are less lethal.