Head for the hills. All of us have prions within us sayeth [ Cell vol. 156 pp. 1127 – 1129, 1193 – 1206, 1206 – 1222 ’14 ]. They are part of the innate immune system and help us fight infection. But aren’t all sorts of horrible disease (Bovine Spongiform Encephalopathy aka BSE, Jakob Creutzfeldt disease aka JC disease, Familial Fatal Insomnia etc. etc.) due to prions? Yes they are.
If you’re a bit shaky on just what a prion is see the previous post which should get you up to speed — https://luysii.wordpress.com/2014/03/30/a-primer-on-prions/.
Initially there was an enormous amount of contention when Stanley Prusiner proposed that Jakob Creutzfeldt disease was due to a protein forming an unusual conformation, which made other copies of the same protein adopt it. It was heredity without DNA or RNA (although this was hotly contended at the time), but the evidence accumulating over the years has convinced pretty much everyone except Laura Manuelidis (about whom more later). It convinced the Nobel Prize committee at any rate.
JC disease is a rapidly progressive dementia which kills people within a year. Fortunately rare (attack rate 1 per million per year) it is due to misfolded protein called PrP (unfortunately initially called ‘the’ prion protein although we now know of many more). Trust me, the few cases I saw over the years were horrible. Despite decades of study, we have no idea what PrP does, and mice totally lacking a functional Prp gene are normal. It is found on the surface of neurons. Bovine Spongiform Encephalopathy was a real scare for a time, because it was feared that you could get it from eating meat from a cow which had it. Fortunately there have been under 200 cases, and none recently.
If you cut your teeth on the immune system being made of antibodies and white cells and little else, you’re seriously out of date. The innate immune system is really the front line against infection by viruses and bacteria, long before antibodies against them can be made. There are all sorts of receptors inside and outside the cell for chemicals found in bacteria and viruses but not in us. Once the receptors have found something suspicious inside the cell, a large protein aggregate forms which activates an enzyme called caspase1 which cleaves the precursor of a protein called interleukin 1Beta, which is then released from some immune cells (no one ever thought the immune system would be simple given all that it has to do). Interleukin1beta acts on all sorts of cells to cause inflammation.
There are different types of inflammasomes and the nomenclature of their components is maddening. Two of the sensors for bacterial products (AIM, NLRP2) induce a polymerization of an inflammasome adaptor protein called ASC producing a platform for the rest of the inflammasome, which contains other proteins bound to it, along with caspase1 whose binding to the other proteins activates it. (Terrible sentence, but things really are that complicated).
ASC, like most platform proteins (scaffold proteins), is made of many different modules. One module in particular is called pyrin (because one of the cardinal signs of inflammation is fever). Here’s where it gets really interesting — the human pyrin domain in ASC can replace the prion domain of the first yeast prion to be discovered (Sup35 aka [ PSI+ ] — see the above link if you don’t know what these are) and still have it function as a prion in yeast. Even more amazing, is the fact that the yeast prion domain can functionally replace ASC modules in our inflammasomes and have them work (read the references above if you don’t believe this — I agree that it’s paradigm destroying). Evidence for human prions just doesn’t get any better than this. Fortunately, our inflammasome prions are totally unrelated to PrP which can cause such havoc with the nervous system.
Historical note: Stanley Prusiner was a year behind me at Penn Med graduating in ’67. Even worse, he was a member of my med school fraternity (which was more a place to get a decent meal than a social organization). Although I doubtless ate lunch and dinner with him before marrying in my Junior year, I have absolutely no recollection of him. I do remember our class’s medical Nobel — Mike Brown. Had I gone to Yale med instead of Penn, Laura Manuelidis would have been my classmate. Small world
Chemiotics II 