I understand that prions are folded proteins that cause infectious diseases in the brains of mammals.
**Some questions on top of the **
1. So don’t eat mammal brains in case of prions – does this mean all mammals have prions in their brains?
2. If I ate a mammal brain and got a prion disease, is it possible that that mammal doesn’t have the disease?
3. Is it the prions themselves that are infectious, or the diseases they cause that are?
4. How do the prions cause the diseases?
In: Biology
1. No, but all the prion badness we know of lives in the brain (and other neural tissues), so when it happens that’s where it coming from. It’s generally just not worth the risk, especially since we don’t have a good way to fight the infection once it’s happened.
2. It’s unlikely. You could spontaneously gain the disease through something like genetic mutation, in which case your disease is unrelated to you dining on brains, but it’s more likely you got the disease from eating a diseased brain (or similar infected protein-type stuff).
3. The prions themselves (though there’s been some research that implies some bacteria might be involved too, in at least some cases).
4. A prion is a protein that’s folded wrong – but it’s folded wrong in just the right way to cause other proteins to get folded wrong, too. We’re still figuring out exactly why this happens in practice, but imagine if you had a box of paperclips, and one of them was so bent out of shape that it was starting to mangle the other, otherwise-normal paperclips. All those mis-folded proteins start causing Problems™, most notably lots of tiny holes in whatever those proteins were a part of.
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