Prions are highly robust and infectious proteins, most notable for their central role in bovine spongiform encephalopathy, commonly called mad cow disease. But very little is known about how ...

Prions, mysterious shape-shifting proteins, can lead to brain disorders such as Creutzfeldt-Jakob disease in humans and ...

(That’s why you may see prion diseases referred to as “spongiform encephalopathies.”) Researchers are still working to understand more about prion diseases and find an effective treatment.

Their findings promise to create new tools for early diagnosis of prions causing bovine spongiform encephalopathy, or “mad cow” disease, in cattle and Creutzfeldt-Jakob disease in people, they say.

Another name for prion disease is transmissible spongiform encephalopathies (TSEs). There are many types of prion diseases that affect both animals and humans. Protein folding is an important ...

Prion diseases, also known as transmissible spongiform encephalopathies (TSEs) are dreaded neurological diseases with a progressive course, and are invariably fatal. They are caused by tiny ...

Prions, the infectious agents responsible for transmissible spongiform encephalopathies, consist mainly of the misfolded prion protein (PrP Sc). The unique mechanism of transmission and the ...

In the 1980s, we learned that cows could develop bovine spongiform encephalopathy, or mad cow disease, from prions—which may have been caught from prion-infected sheep. A few years later ...

In particular, the replication of prions in the brain creates tiny bubbles that lead to the formation of microscopic holes making the brain tissue resemble a sponge, hence the name spongiform ...

They fear a returning threat from the prion disease mad cow (bovine spongiform encephalopathy) which roiled US markets 20 years ago. It led to devastating international boycotts of US beef ...

A variant form of Creutzfeldt-Jakob disease has long been tied to eating beef from cattle infected with mad cow disease, or bovine spongiform encephalopathy, which is another prion disorder.