Prion proteins may store memories
Study hints at vital job for two-faced proteins.
30 December 2003
HELEN PEARSON

Mystery proteins called prions, which can flip between two different shapes,
might help in laying down memories, according to US researchers. The finding
hints at an entirely new set of roles for the proteins.

Prions are unusual in the protein world: when they adopt one of their
guises, they can reproduce, converting other identical proteins into copies
of themselves. Often such replicating prions are harmful - they clog up the
brains of cattle with mad cow disease and patients with variant
Creutzfeldt-Jakob disease (vCJD).

Now a team led by Eric Kandel at Columbia University in New York has found
that a prion-like protein called CPEB may help nerve cells store memories. A
transient electrical signal in the brain might flip CPEB into its prion
form, the researchers suggest, helping to create a permanent memory trace.

The finding raises the prospect that other prion-like proteins could serve
all kinds of essential biological functions. "I think there's tons of
them,"
says team member and prion expert Susan Lindquist of the Whitehead Institute
in Cambridge, Massachusetts.

Prions that switch genes on and off in one cell, say, could be passed onto
another, Lindquist suggests - a form of inheritance that bypasses DNA. "I
think it's an aspect of protein biology that has probably existed since the
beginning of time," she says.

Read the rest at Nature
http://www.nature.com/nsu/031229/031229-2.html

Posted by
Robert Karl Stonjek.
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