Prion Diseases

Research paper. Distinct neuropsychological profiles correspond to distribution of cortical thinning in inherited prion disease caused by insertional mutation. ... Background The human prion diseases are a group of universally fatal neurodegenerative

Activated microglia are a feature of the host response to neurodegeneration in Parkinson's disease (PD) and are thought to contribute to disease progression. Recent evidence suggests that extracellular -synuclein (eSNCA) may play an important role in the pathogenesis of PD and that this may be mediated by a microglial response.|Activated microglia are a feature of the host response to neurodegeneration in Parkinson's disease (PD) and are thought to contribute to disease progression. Recent evidence sugge

Journal of Cerebral Blood Flow & Metabolism stands at the interface between basic and clinical neurovascular research, and features research on experimental, theoretical, and clinical aspects of brain circulation, metabolism and imaging. The journal is relevant to any physician or scientist with an interest in brain function, cerebrovascular disease, cerebral vascular regulation and brain metabolism, including neurologists, neurochemists, physiologists, pharmacologists, anesthesiologists, neuroradiologist

To better characterize the value of cerebrospinal fluid (CSF) proteins as diagnostic markers in a clinical population of subacute encephalopathy patients with relatively low prevalence of sporadic Creutzfeldt-Jakob disease (sCJD), we studied the diagnostic accuracies of several such markers (14-3-3, tau and S100B) in 1000 prospectively and sequentially recruited Canadian patients with clinically suspected sCJD.|To better characterize the value of cerebrospinal fluid (CSF) proteins as diagnostic markers in

We propose an innovative, integrated, cost-effective health system to combat major non-communicable diseases (NCDs), including cardiovascular, chronic respiratory, metabolic, rheumatologic and neurologic disorders and cancers, which together are the predominant health problem of the 21st century. This proposed holistic strategy involves comprehensive patient-centered integrated care and multi-scale, multi-modal and multi-level systems approaches to tackle NCDs as a common group of diseases. Rather than st

Human (Hu) familial prion diseases are associated with about 40 point mutations of the gene coding for the prion protein (PrP). Most of the variants associated with these mutations are located in the globular domain of the protein. We performed 50ns of molecular dynamics for each of these mutants to investigate their structure in aqueous solution. Overall, 1.6s of molecular dynamics data is presented. The calculations are based on the AMBER(parm99) force field, which has been shown to reproduce very accurately the structural features of the HuPrP wild type and a few variants for which experimental structural information is available. The variants present structural determinants different from those of wild-type HuPrP and the protective mutation HuPrP(E219K-129M). These include the loss of salt bridges in (2)-(3) regions and the loss of -stacking interactions in the (2)-(2) loop. In addition, in the majority of the mutants, the (3) helix is more flexible and Y169 is

Prions, the agents responsible for transmissible spongiform encephalopathies, are infectious proteins consisting primarily of scrapie prion protein (PrP(Sc)), a misfolded, -sheet enriched and aggregated form of the host-encoded cellular prion protein (PrP(C)). Their propagation is based on an autocatalytic PrP conversion process. Despite the lack of a nucleic acid genome, different prion strains have been isolated from animal diseases. Increasing evidence supports the view that strain-specific properties may be enciphered within conformational variations of PrP(Sc). In humans, sporadic Creutzfeldt-Jakob disease (sCJD) is the most frequent form of prion diseases and has demonstrated a wide phenotypic and molecular spectrum. In contrast, variant Creutzfeldt-Jakob disease (vCJD), which results from oral exposure to the agent of bovine spongiform encephalopathy, is a highly stereotyped disease, that, until now, has only occurred in patients who are methionine homozygous at codon 129 of

It is generally accepted that spongiform encephalopathies result from the aggregation into amyloid of a ubiquitous protein, the so-called prion protein. As a consequence, the dynamics of amyloid formation should explain the characteristics of the prion diseases: infectivity as well as sporadic and genetic occurrence, long incubation time, species barriers and strain specificities. The success of this amyloid hypothesis is due to the good qualitative agreement of this hypothesis with the observations. However, a number of difficulties appeared when comparing quantitatively the in vitro experimental results with the theoretical models, suggesting that some differences should hide important discrepancies. We used well defined quantitative models to analyze the experimental results obtained by in vitro polymerization of the recombinant hamster prion protein. Although the dynamics of polymerization resembles a simple nucleus-dependent fibrillogenesis, neither the initial concentration

The left-handed beta-helix (LH) has received interest recently as it folds as a possible solution for the structure of misfolded proteins associated with prion and Huntington's diseases. Through a combination of sequence and structure analysis, we uncover a novel feature that is common to this unique fold: a two-fold symmetry in both sequence and structure, and this feature always coupled with extended loops in the middle of the helix. Since the results reveal a two-fold symmetric pattern both in the sequence and structure, it may indicate that the symmetry in tertiary structure is coded by the symmetry in primary sequence, which agrees with Anfisen's proposal that a protein's amino-acid sequence specify its three-dimensional structure. It may also indicate that LH adopts a two-fold repeat pattern during the evolution process and symmetry helps maintaining the stability of the helix structure. The two-fold symmetric pattern and extended loops might be important in maintaining

Many experimental studies have shown that the prion AGAAAAGA palindrome hydrophobic region (113-120) has amyloid fibril forming properties and plays an important role in prion diseases. However, due to the unstable, noncrystalline and insoluble nature of the amyloid fibril, to date structural information on AGAAAAGA region (113-120) has been very limited. This region falls just within the N-terminal unstructured region PrP (1-123) of prion proteins. Traditional X-ray crystallography and nuclear magnetic resonance (NMR) spectroscopy experimental methods cannot be used to get its structural information. Under this background, this paper introduces a novel approach of the canonical dual theory to address the 3D atomic-resolution structure of prion AGAAAAGA amyloid fibrils. The novel and powerful canonical dual computational approach introduced in this paper is for the molecular modeling of prion AGAAAAGA amyloid fibrils, and that the optimal atomic-resolution structures of prion AGAAAAGA

EFNS guidelines on the molecular diagnosis of channelopathies, epilepsies, migraine, stroke and dementias.

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