Bad news! Prions are extremely stable and not even boiling, Protease or high radiation can disrupt them.
Proteins central to the pathology of Alzheimer’s disease act as prions – study
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Re: Proteins central to the pathology of Alzheimer’s disease act as prions – study
#52Earlier quoted context omitted.
one of the authors discovered prions, so I am not so quick to discount their work.
that's an argument from authority rather than one of science though. we believe things only once we've exhausted our attempts to disprove it
> that's an argument from authority rather than one of science though.
No. An appeal to authority would be "this must be true because someone authoritative said it". Saying "I am willing to treat this claim more credibly than other claims because the source is credible" is not a logical fallacy.
Re: Proteins central to the pathology of Alzheimer’s disease act as prions – study
#53Bad news! Prions are extremely stable and not even boiling, Protease or high radiation can disrupt them.
Some prions are extremely stable
Re: Proteins central to the pathology of Alzheimer’s disease act as prions – study
#54Earlier quoted context omitted.
Speculatively, in the future we may be able to design proteins that would target the prions and destroy them or refold them into less harmful shapes. To do that we would need to 1. know what protein shape would be required and 2. be able to figure out how to make that shape (what sequence would happen to fold itself into that shape). I would think we would need to advance quite a bit more in protein science before th…
Just to provide background, what you describe is nowhere close to feasible. Designing novel proteins is computationally intractable. It took evolution billions of years and parallel optimization to figure out how to problem solve with polypeptides. We're not even at the punch card phase.
Would quantum computers with more logical qbits help? My layman impression was that this could solve protein folding.
Re: Proteins central to the pathology of Alzheimer’s disease act as prions – study
#55The problem is too little capitalism in science. Hear me out on this one please. We humans have a natural fear of breaking up into small groups and parallel execute counterrunning endavours.
Re: Proteins central to the pathology of Alzheimer’s disease act as prions – study
#56How does a protein come to be misfolded? Is it a random mutation that happens to be self-propagating? Is it different between alzheimers and other ones like mad cow?
I have no idea what the mechanisms affecting protein folding are in this context, but if you are interested in learning more about how proteins fold and perhaps helping researchers fold interesting new ones, check out FoldIt (a protein folding citizen science project): https://fold.it/portal/ It was featured in Werner Herzog's Lo and Behold and I had the privilege of taking a class taught by a professor involved in i…
This still exists? I'll have to check it out again sometime...
Re: Proteins central to the pathology of Alzheimer’s disease act as prions – study
#57Taken out of context, the press release makes this finding look a lot more ground-breaking than it is after I quickly read through the actual study. Still a good piece of work though. It was already known, as pointed out in the actual paper, that Amyloid-beta (AB) and Tau, the proteins that have long been implicated in Alzheimer's disease (AD), have prion-like properties which means they exist in an abnormal 3D confi…
could that be interpreted as the ones with trash balls (NFTs) might actually be the ones handling it 'better'?
Could just be an innocuous buildup with no effects either way, that just results from having the disease a long time. I doubt it's a direct result of handling the disease well but I don't know anything about what defenses our brains have against prions
Re: Proteins central to the pathology of Alzheimer’s disease act as prions – study
#58Earlier quoted context omitted.
that's an argument from authority rather than one of science though. we believe things only once we've exhausted our attempts to disprove it
> that's an argument from authority rather than one of science though. No. An appeal to authority would be "this must be true because someone authoritative said it". Saying "I am willing to treat this claim more credibly than other claims because the source is credible" is not a logical fallacy.
It's a Hacker News favorite to point out logical fallacies in comments as if that automatically refutes them.
Re: Proteins central to the pathology of Alzheimer’s disease act as prions – study
#59I still remember undergraduate biology class where the lecturer mentioned that crazy idea of proteins being infectious. Most scientist thought the results were errors and that Prusiner was a fool. Even after kuru was proven to be cause by infectious proteins.
Re: Proteins central to the pathology of Alzheimer’s disease act as prions – study
#60Is it possible that these prions were also acquired by human through meat consumption? As in the case with PrP prion from Mad Cow Disease which spread through meat eating as well. Another very similar case is by eating fruit bats containing toxic BMAA, which has a very similar structure to L-Serine amino acid causing it to be picked up instead during the protein synthesis process and resulting in a misfolded version. Studies are being done as BMAA could be a likely cause for many neurological disorders such as Parkinson's.
Has there ever been any researches in determining the rates of Alzheimer disease in meat eaters vs. vegetarians?