An Emerging Concept of Prion Infections as a Form of Transmissible Cerebral Amyloidosis

Abstract

Proteins are a major constituent of cells with specific biological functions. Besides the primary structure that is simply the sequence of amino acids that comprise a protein, the secondary structure represents the first step of folding defining its general conformation. The biological functions of proteins are directly dependent on the acquisition of their conformation. The same protein can have different stable states, which may participate with different functions in the cell. The amyloid diseases comprise Alzheimer’s and Parkinson’s diseases, type II diabetes mellitus and systemic amyloidosis. Amyloid fibers are insoluble, resistant to proteolysis and show an extremely high content of β-sheet, in a very similar structure to the one observed among prion rods, associated to the transmissible spongiform encephalopathies. All these diseases are “infectious” in the sense that misfolded β-sheeted conformers formed in a nucleation process in which preformed metastable oligomer acts as a seed to convert a normal isoform into an abnormal protein with a misfolded conformation. Only prion infections have a proven infectivity in a microbiological sense; some recent observations, however, detected the transmissibility of systemic amyloidosis by a prion-like mechanism among mice. Prions diseases and amyloidosis present many similar aspects of the so-called conformational diseases; according to this interpretation the prion infections could be considered as a form of transmissible cerebral amyloidosis.