Prion

An Indian biologist has discovered the existence of special proteins, called prions, in plants. Earlier found in yeast, insects, and mammals, this protein could explain the decades-old mystery of how even plants formed memories. Sohini Chakrabortee ...

Prions (also known as misfolded proteins) cause degenerative diseases in animals and humans, including mad cow and Creutzfeld-Jakob. But the protein Lindquist found, which is called Luminidependens (LD), which responds to natural light and controls ...

But a new study shows that proteins called prions, which are responsible for degenerative illnesses in humans and animals, can also be used by plants to store memory. The same prions that cause human brains to suffer mad cow disease, for instance, may ...

A research team affiliated with the Whitehead Institute for Biomedical Research, MIT and the Howard Hughes Medical Institute have discovered a prion-like protein in a plant (Arabidopsis thaliana, a flowering mustard plant) that substantiates this belief.

Transmission of prion protein seems to be the cause of variant Creutzfeldt-Jakob disease, of which there are about 225 reported cases in the world's literature, mostly from the U.K., and probably related to bovine spongiform encephalopathy, so-called ...

“This is the first evidence that a plant protein may self-replicate as a prion – this opens up the possibility of protein-based memories in plants,” said Sohini Chakrabortee, who led the research as a post-doctoral fellow in the laboratory of Susan ...