London, Feb 2 (ANI): Now fish like sheep, elk and humans could suffer a version of mad cow disease, or BSE, according to preliminary evidence. The results might help reveal how the disease jumps from species to species.
Infectious prions are thought to cause BSE and human variant Creutzfeldt-Jakob disease (vCJD). They probably crossed from sheep to cows and then to humans in infected meat. Now a team at the University of Konstanz in Germany has identified a cousin of the prion protein in pufferfish.
The researchers show that the fish protein is different at key sites from the prion protein found in mammals. "It's unlikely that transmission could occur between such different animals", study leader Edward Malaga-Trillo was quoted by Nature as saying.
The researchers now hope to work out whether mutating certain constituent amino acids can convert a harmless fish prion into one that infects mice. Prions cause disease when they fold up in an unusual way - and recruit other prions to form poisonous clumps in the brain.
Because some fish are easily altered by genetic engineering, they might be used to pinpoint other genes that help this protein conversion, suggests prion researcher Adriano Aguzzi of the Institute of Neuropathology in Zurich, Switzerland. "Pulling out a gene from fish is just a beginning", he added.
Scientists currently have no idea whether fish—or chickens, turtles and frogs, which also harbour prions—suffer diseases as a result. This is partly because they don't know what symptoms to look for. Experts are also largely ignorant about what natural function the normal protein performs, although previous work has suggested that it may bind and regulate copper.
The discovery of a prion in fish—which are evolutionarily distant from humans—suggest that the protein is "probably doing something fairly important and basic", says Jonathan Weissman, who studies protein folding at the University of California in San Francisco.
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