Prion - Discovery

Discovery

During the 1960s, radiation biologist Tikvah Alper and mathematician John Stanley Griffith developed the hypothesis that some transmissible spongiform encephalopathies are caused by an infectious agent consisting solely of proteins. Alper and Griffith wanted to account for the discovery that the mysterious infectious agent causing the diseases scrapie and Creutzfeldt–Jakob disease resisted ionizing radiation. (A single ionizing "hit" normally destroys an entire infectious particle, and the dose needed to hit half the particles depends on the size of the particles. The data suggested that the infectious agent was too small to be a virus.)

Francis Crick recognized the potential importance of the Griffith protein-only hypothesis for scrapie propagation in the second edition of his "Central dogma of molecular biology" (1970): while asserting that the flow of sequence information from protein to protein, or from protein to RNA and DNA was "precluded", he noted that Griffith's hypothesis was a potential contradiction (although it was not so promoted by Griffith). The revised hypothesis was later formulated, in part, to accommodate reverse transcription (which both Howard Temin and David Baltimore discovered in 1970).

In 1982, Stanley B. Prusiner of the University of California, San Francisco announced that his team had purified the hypothetical infectious prion, and that the infectious agent consisted mainly of a specific protein – though they did not manage to isolate the protein until two years after Prusiner's announcement. While the infectious agent was named a prion, the specific protein that the prion was composed of is also known as the Prion Protein (PrP), though this protein may occur both in infectious and non-infectious forms. Prusiner won the Nobel Prize in Physiology or Medicine in 1997 for his research into prions.