reply to post by flice
No, that's not what the article is saying. They're saying there are multiple types of "good" prions, and that they'd found a second one they
named "shadoo", and that it complements the normal PrP prion.
You produce these normally. The issue is when they misfold. When proteins are made, they're intended to fold a certain way. The usefulness of most
proteins depends on their shapes, and on the pattern of electrical charges on them.
The structure of the proteins normally determines how they fold, but it's not always the only way they
can fold, and the other shape(s) they
can assume may be useless or harmful. There are other enzymes and what are called "chaperone" molecules which either re-fold, denature or destroy
the errant proteins.
You produce some misfolded proteins as a matter of statistics, but you destroy them, normally. Other proteins may be misfolded in a way which you have
no enzymes or chaperones to deal with, and they accumulate. Worse, they may come in contact with normally folded proteins and cause them to misfold as
well.
That's the case with errant prions, at least the vCJD and Kuru types, I'm sure there are others.
It really hasn't got beans to do with "electromagnetic contamination", whatever that might be. Protein folding is a really complex issue, and it's
really easy for it to "go wrong". Kuru is a prion disease, and was known to infect the Fore before 1900, scrapie is a prion disease of sheep and has
been recorded back as far as the mid 1700's. That sort of rules out "electromagnetic contamination" as a possibility, if you consider you have
defensive systems against this sort of thing in your cells that also tells you the general problem exists all the time. It's just that the vCJD and
Kuru prions (and now possibly a misfolded shadoo) are things you have no defensive systems tailored for specifically.
