Topic: prions

The Institute for Neurodegenerative Diseases at UCSF, in the Sandler Neurosciences Center at Mission Bay, studies how the conformational heterogeneity, maturation and transmission of proteopathic assemblies (prions) of tau, amyloid-beta and alpha-synuclein differ across neural cell types and diseases. The Professional Researcher helps manage and contributes to the Condello Lab's program in ex vivo human molecular neuropathology, biochemistry and advanced optical imaging of postmortem brain from Alzheimer's disease and frontotemporal dementia with tauopathy. Work covers procurement and characte

Transmissible spongiform encephalopathies (TSEs) are neurodegenerative diseases of humans and many animal species caused by prions. The main constituent of prions is PrPSc, an aggregated moiety of the host-derived membrane glycolipoprotein PrPC. Prions were found to encipher many phenotypic, genetically stable TSE variants. The latter is very surprising, since PrPC is encoded by the host genome and all prion strains share the same amino acid sequence. Here I will review what is known about the infectivity, the neurotoxicity, and the neuroinvasiveness of prions. Also, I will explain why I regar