hist-brewing: Yeast News

[PBLoomis at aol.com]

    Here we are, on the frontiers of research, and lapping it up.  8-)
    Scotti

In a message dated 3/9/01 7:17:18 AM Central Standard Time, 
inthenews at SIGMAXI.ORG writes:

> NEW CLUES ON MAD COW DISEASE
>  from The San Francisco Chronicle
>  
>  Recycling dead animals into livestock feed may have amplified the virulence
>  of proteins that can cause mad cow disease, creating infectious particles
>  that could more easily jump from cattle into humans, new research suggests.
>  
>  Scientists have suspected for years that the brain-wasting disease is 
caused
>  by misshapen proteins, known as prions, and that livestock feeding 
practices
>  spread the disease among cattle, first in Britain and later in Europe.
>  
>  But because of the difficulty and danger of experimenting on animals,
>  scientists could never be  clear just how prions might have cleared the
>  biological barriers that normally protect one species from the diseases of
>  another.
>  
>  New research, reported today in the journal Nature by researchers at the
>  University of California at San Francisco, try to shed some light on this
>  murky corner of biology by using prions that arise in fast-growing yeast.
>  
<http://sfgate.com/cgi-bin/article.cgi?file=/c/a/2001/03/08/MN14811.DTL&type
>  =science>
>  

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