University of Minnesota Twin Cities researchers have developed a new diagnostic technique that will allow for faster and more accurate detection of neurodegenerative diseases. The method will likely open a door for earlier ...
Bio & Medicine
May 8, 2023
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53
In a new study, researchers from the Case Western Reserve University School of Medicine have identified the structure of protein fibrils linked to a hereditary form of human prion disease. This insight, they say, reveals ...
Cell & Microbiology
Sep 12, 2022
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142
Many plants and trees flower in the spring when it gets warmer. How plants sense Scientists from the UK, France, Korea and Germany focused on a protein called EARLY FLOWERING3 (ELF3). ELF3 is a key part of the circadian clock ...
Plants & Animals
Aug 27, 2020
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21
A molecular biologist at the University of Massachusetts Amherst who has for decades studied the nightmarish group of fatal diseases caused by prions—chronic wasting disease in deer, mad cow in cattle and its human analog—credits ...
Molecular & Computational biology
May 6, 2020
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162
Researchers said Wednesday they believe they may have found the cause of mad cow disease, while stressing the need to maintain precautionary measures to avoid a potential re-emergence of the illness.
Veterinary medicine
Dec 18, 2019
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505
A team of researchers from Durham University in the U.K. and Shaanxi Normal University in China has discovered a type of protein that forms naturally into two main types of helical braids. In their paper published in the ...
Alzheimer's disease results from a dysfunctional stacking of protein molecules that form long fibers inside brain cells. Similar stacking occurs in sickle-cell anemia and mad cow disease.
General Physics
Jul 14, 2017
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427
Prion diseases are scary, incurable and fatal. They first gained notoriety when cows became infected by prion proteins and, in turn, infected people. Fervor surrounding mad cow disease resulted in the U.S. banning imports ...
Biochemistry
Mar 20, 2017
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11
The highly pathogenic Staphylococcus aureus bacteria is one of the five most common causes of hospital-acquired infections. In the US alone, approximately 500,000 patients at hospitals contract a staph infection. It is the ...
Biochemistry
Feb 24, 2017
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40
(Phys.org)—A pair of researchers at Harvard Medical School has found an instance of a bacterial protein that behaves like a prion when inserted into another type of bacteria. In their paper published in the journal Science, ...
Bovine spongiform encephalopathy (BSE), commonly known as mad-cow disease (MCD), is a fatal, neurodegenerative disease in cattle, that causes a spongy degeneration in the brain and spinal cord. BSE has a long incubation period, about 4 years, usually affecting adult cattle at a peak age onset of four to five years, all breeds being equally susceptible. In the United Kingdom, the country worst affected, more than 179,000 cattle have been infected and 4.4 million slaughtered during the eradication programme.
It is believed by most scientists that the disease may be transmitted to human beings who eat the brain or spinal cord of infected carcasses. In humans, it is known as new variant Creutzfeldt-Jakob disease (vCJD or nvCJD), and by February 2009, it had killed 164 people in Britain, and 42 elsewhere with the number expected to rise because of the disease's long incubation period. Between 460,000 and 482,000 BSE-infected animals had entered the human food chain before controls on high-risk offal were introduced in 1989.
A British inquiry into BSE concluded that the epidemic was caused by cattle, who are normally herbivores, being fed the remains of other cattle in the form of meat and bone meal (MBM), which caused the infectious agent to spread. The origin of the disease itself remains unknown. The infectious agent is distinctive for the high temperatures at which it remains viable; this contributed to the spread of the disease in Britain, which had reduced the temperatures used during its rendering process. Another contributory factor was the feeding of infected protein supplements to very young calves.
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