rhinoceros
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Mad cows and nanomachines
« on: 2003-02-18 20:46:21 » |
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[rhinoceros]
Very tiny wires can be produced from a rogue protein which is responsible for the Creutzfeld Jacob disease. This could be useful for nanotech.
Prions get wired
Nanotech circuits could bud from brain's bane.
by Helen Pearson
Nature, 16 February 2003
http://www.nature.com/nsu/030210/030210-21.html
Rogue proteins blamed for mad cow disease could yet find a use — in tiny electrical wires, scientists revealed this week in Denver.
The proteins, called prions, are also thought to cause the human brain disease variant Creutzfeld Jacob disease (vCJD) when they wad together into tough, messy clumps.
But a version of prions found in yeast instead assemble themselves into long threads, Susan Lindquist of the Whitehead Institute in Boston told the annual meeting of the American Association for the Advancement of Sciences. "They're as tough as can be," she said.
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When a mis-folded prion encounters a normal one, it converts it into the rogue form. In mammals such as sheep, humans, cows and deer, the renegade prions clog up into dementia-causing clumps.
In yeast, however, misfolded prions naturally form better-behaved structures. Lindquist seeded the prion wires by dropping a small string of abnormal yeast prions into a test tube soup of regular ones. Like toppling dominos, the proteins rapidly string themselves together, she explains.
So far, the team has built wires one ten thousandth of a millimeter in diameter and up to one millimeter long, but they hope to narrow and lengthen them. Lindquist genetically engineered bacteria E.coli to manufacture ample supplies of the yeast prion.
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