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Breakthrough in chronic debilitating disease research reveals distinct strains of deer and elk prions
The infectious proteins called prions cause a group of related, fatal and incurable neurodegenerative disorders, including bovine spongiform encephalopathy, mad cow disease and Creutzfeldt-Jakob disease, both of which affect humans.
Chronic debilitating disease or CWD, also caused by prions, has reached the point of a global epidemic among deer, elk and members of the deer family. The latest estimates show that 26 states and three Canadian provinces have reported the disease in farm animals and animals roaming free. The MDC was inadvertently introduced in South Korea in the 1990s and has recently been identified in Norway, Finland and Sweden.
Scientists' efforts to conduct more in-depth research have been hampered by the constraints of studying this disease in deer and elk; This type of research is difficult, expensive and requires large lab spaces.
But that can now change. Researchers at Colorado State University, led by Professor Glenn Telling, have developed a novel gene-focused approach to studying chronic wasting disease in mice, providing research opportunities that did not exist. before.
"It's a real breakthrough on the ground," said Telling, director of the CSU's Center for Prion Research. The study was published on May 29 in the Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences.
The research team also detected a difference in the properties of prion strains in deer and elk, which is significant as these properties control the ability of prions to transmit disease between species.
Saying says that the development of the new mouse model has been going on for years. Scientists have replaced the gene that encodes the prion protein in mice and replaced it with an exact replica of code coming from deer or elk.
As a result of this work, the research team learned that gene-targeted mice have different strains of chronic debilitating disease. This sounds like different strains of viruses that exist for conditions such as the flu and herpes, Telling said.
Researchers have so far not been able to detect these different strains in murine models, even though deer and elk were spreading different strains of MDC.
Using this new research model, Dr. Telling explained that scientists can more easily study the pathways used by prions to access the central nervous system and spread diseases, called peripheral pathogenesis.
Understanding the number of MDC strains in the world is extremely important for animal and human health.
"Ultimately, we want to understand if humans exposed to MDC prions will contract a new form of human prion disease," Telling said. "We still do not understand the possibility that prions transmit diseases from one species to another."
The research team is already working on a gene-targeted model to study the transmission potential of CWD to humans.
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This story was published on: 2019-06-11. To contact the author, please use the contact information in the article.
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