I remember hearing that prions like mad cow disease are misfolded proteins that manipulate other proteins they come into contact with. If that’s the case why can’t you use another prion to unfold it and restore it to normal?
In: Biology
If you’re interested, you can install Folding@home, and contribute your computer’s idle time where the CPU isn’t doing any other work to help compute protein foldings. This project constitutes the single largest focused computing effort on the planet, surpassing all the worlds top super computers in computing power, at least individually.
We have really no idea what shapes proteins are. Folding@home is all about simulating the atoms to try to find structures that are the most stable and have the lowest ground state. These are LIKELY the shapes of our proteins. And bear in mind there can be multiple stable states, not just the lowest ground state, and once you figure out what all they can be, you then need to figure out which shapes are actually used in our bodies, and which are the prions.
So yeah, we’re just not far along enough in this effort.
Latest Answers