Now Showing - Prion Proteins Invasion and Motility

Under the direction of Byron Caughey, Ph.D., at the Rocky Mountain Laboratories (RML) and Marco Prado, Ph.D. at the University of Minas Gerais in Belo Horizonte, Brazil, the team performed the research in laboratory cultures using a rodent-adapted form of scrapie protein and cells taken from the central nervous system of mouse and hamster brains. The proteins were first “branded” with fluorescent dyes so they could be easily tracked.

The work also revealed that a similar trafficking process might occur with the key plaque-forming protein in Alzheimer’s disease, which is not a TSE but a different type of degenerative brain disease, according to Gerald Baron, Ph.D., one of the lead RML researchers. RML, located in Hamilton, MT, is part of the National Institute of Allergy and Infectious Diseases (NIAID) of the National Institutes of Health. The new report appears in the May 25 issue of The Journal of Neuroscience.

“These findings offer intriguing leads toward developing therapies to stop the spread of TSE and possibly other degenerative brain diseases,” says NIAID Director Dr. Anthony Fauci. “Potentially, it may be possible to block the pathways that prions use to invade cells, their exit to other cells or their replication within the cells.”

Those are precisely some of the next experiments the RML group is pursuing, along with trying to move the fluorescent tracking method from laboratory cell cultures to live mice and hamsters. Along with Drs. Caughey, Prado and Baron, other key researchers involved in the project included Kil Sun Lee, Ph.D., RML, and former RML employee Ana Cristina Magalhães, Ph.D., also from the Federal University of Minas Gerais. Dr. Baron explains that throughout his seven years at RML, he and others have contemplated how to use fluorescent tracking to learn more about TSEs, but they struggled to develop an effective method to do so.

“When I started working on TSEs, I thought about them as being similar to intracellular bacterial pathogens — something that replicates within an animal or human host cell,” says Dr. Baron. “I wanted to know how such a pathogen binds to the host cell, and how it enters, replicates and spreads to other cells.”

Dr. Baron says researchers have tracked infectious prion protein moving through other parts of animal bodies up to the brain, but no one had ever tracked the protein movement within animal brain cells. One of the most difficult aspects of the experiment, he says, was finding a way to fluorescently tag the TSE prion proteins without altering them — while still allowing researchers to identify the prions as they penetrated the cells and spread within the long projections that nerve cells develop to send signals to other nerve cells.

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