Anchor molecule capturing prion

 Glycosylphosphatidylinositol (GPI) molecules may be responsible for promoting infection by prion molecules, causing changes to its configuration from harmless to harmful, and making additional prions fold to cause illness.  A German-Swiss research team led by Peter Seeberger, ETH Zurich Professor for Organic Chemistry, and Christian Becker, Professor at the Protein Chemistry Laboratory of the Technical University of Munich have been the first to artificially replicate the molecule complex’s complicated structure in the laboratory.   This breakthrough means that prion researchers can now at last investigate the role of the GPI anchor and its appended prion in more detail to discover whether the GPI really does have an effect on the folding of the prion and its resulting pathogenic properties.    Report of this research may be found in Angewandte Chemie.

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This entry was posted on Tuesday, December 2nd, 2008 at 9:08 am and is filed under Methods, Microbiology, Science News. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.