A simplified recipe for prions

摘要

As long ago as the 1960s, it was proposed that the infectious agent of the transmissible spon-giform encephalopathies (TSEs), or prion diseases, was composed of protein with no essential nucleic acid component. From the beginning, one basic idea was that the causative agent was a corrupted and pathological form of a host protein that could propagate itself by causing its normal homolog to convert to the pathological form (1). This concept, now commonly known as the "prion hypothesis", has been extremely difficult to prove.