This somehow causes the animals' own cellular prions to adopt the same, abnormal shape. Thereafter these alien molecules accumulate, the theory goes, and bring about brain damage. Small wonder, then, that considerable research interest is focused on how and why such changes in protein structure happen. The latest news on this front is that the prion protein actually alters its form every few minutes. Moreover, this switching appears to be so fast as to rule out the possibility that the molecules tarry at intermediate shapes between the two extremes.
Healthy prions are very similar from mammal to mammal.
They sit on cell surfaces and are made up of two regions. Glockshuber and colleagues carried out their studies on the structured section of a mouse prion whose fluorescence under UV light changes according to its shape, allowing them to track its movements. As well as edging the prion story a little further forward, this work is also of academic interest to protein theorists.