How, exactly, do prion proteins cause disease?

When prions were first discovered in the 1980s it was immensely controversial whether an isolated protein molecule could act as an infectious agent without any associated nucleic acid, that is, without a genome to encode future generations. I was lucky enough to be able to follow from the sidelines as the prion story slowly unfolded throughout the 1990s. By and large, most of the major questions about prions seem now to have been answered, but one big issue still remains – how exactly do these proteins cause disease?

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Blog Archive How, exactly, do prion proteins cause disease? 

Source: MicrobiologyBytes

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