Microbiology and Immunology 2500A/B Lecture Notes - Lecture 34: Bovine Spongiform Encephalopathy, Chronic Wasting Disease, Neurodegeneration
7 Jun 2019
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Prions lecture 34 april 5th, 2019. Neurodegenerative diseases: always fatal, no available therapies. Transmissible: b/c they can be transmitted experimentally by inoculation. Spongiform: b/c microscopic vacuoles in brain tissue are a feature that help identify the disease. Encephalopathies: b/c they are diseases (-pathy) of the brain (encephalo-) The oldest known tse (since mid 1700s) Transmission is likely from ewes to offspring, but is not well understood: not thought to be transmissible to humans. Bovine spongiform encephalopathy (bse) = "mad cow disease" The "protein only" hypothesis for scrapie was first proposed by stanley pruisner in 1982. Tses were initially thought to be caused by an unidentified "slow" virus. The dogma was that transmissible infections required nucleic acid. Did experiments where he treated extracts with dnase and rnase: came to the conclusion that you could destroy all the nucleic acid, but it would still be infectious. What did he get for all this: lost all his grants, was denied tenure at ucsf.
