Newswise — CLEVELAND—The highest-ever resolution imaging of an infectious prion provides the first atomic-level data of how these abnormal proteins are assembled to cause fatal neurodegenerative diseases in people and animals—and how they can be potentially targeted by new therapies.
Conducted by Case Western Reserve University and the National Institutes of Health (NIH), the research is available at Molecular Cell. (The DOI for the paper: 10.1016/j.molcel.2021.08.011.)
“These detailed prion structures provide a new premise for understanding and targeting these currently untreatable diseases,” said Allison Kraus, lead and co-corresponding author of the research and an assistant professor in the Department of Pathology at the Case Western Reserve School of Medicine. “It will now be much easier to develop and test hypotheses about how prions are assembled as highly…
