Author: HUAZHONG Date: 2019-02-22
The Molecular Virology Group of the College of Life Sciences of the Northwest A&F University recently published a paper entitled "A virus-expressing factor with prion characteristics" in the journal Nature Communications, which found prions in the virus. A discovery or a dawn for the prevention and treatment of Alzheimer's disease.
Prions are a class of infectious, specific proteins that transfer a conformation between homologous proteins and even different proteins, eventually causing all proteins to become allosteric.
In the 1980s, scientists discovered the presence of prions in the study of infectious spongiform encephalopathy. American biochemist Stanley Prusina won the 1997 Nobel Prize in Physiology or Medicine for discovering prions.
For nearly 40 years, scientists have discovered prions in animals, plants, fungi and bacteria. However, as a large number of life forms in nature, which are widely distributed, the presence or absence of prions in the virus has not been known.
Limited by the prediction and identification methods of prions, before 2016, people's understanding of prions was limited to the animal and fungi communities. In 2016, researchers at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology reported the first prion found in plants in the Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences. In 2017, scientists at Harvard University reported the first prion found in bacteria in Science.
Xu Xiaodong, an associate professor at Northwest A&F University, accidentally discovered that the protein had unusual aggregation behavior when studying the baculovirus expression factor LEF-10. This phenomenon is very similar to the aggregation characteristics of prions. Through experiments, they identified a prion domain of only 23 amino acid residues in LEF-10, unlike all known prion domains. In virus-infected insect cells, highly expressed LEF-10 can be converted from a soluble state to an aggregated state, thereby regulating the proliferation of the virus.
Xu Xiaodong said that people have long discovered that there is a relationship between herpes virus infection and Alzheimer's disease. If herpes virus can also encode prion, it is possible to induce Alzheimer's disease in the human body. Bringing a new dawn to the prevention and treatment of Alzheimer's disease.
Source: Xinhua News Agency
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