Hhmi Bulletin 3 4 Hhmi Club
HHMI BULLETIN 4000 Jones Bridge Road • Chevy Chase, Maryland 20815-6789 Howard Hughes Medical Institute www.hhmi.org One Lump or Two? in this issue Once again, those fast-growing yeast find a way to turn a The Silicon Marvel long-held theory on its head. This time, it’s about prions, • Prions for Good which aren’t as universally nasty as once suspected. Some may actually help organisms evolve. The yeast colony shown here www.hhmi.org A Kaleidoscopic View contains a protein in its prion form. Because the prion, known as PSI+, is self-replicating and forms fibrous amyloids, the yeast look lumpy and bumpy—strikingly different from normally smooth yeast. Susan Lindquist’s group has found 19 yeast proteins that can switch back and forth between a normal and a prion version. The prions are thought to help the yeast adapt to changing conditions (see “A Silver Lining,” page 22). LIGHT MOVES v ol. 23 Heather True / Lindquist lab /no. 02 O b s e r v a t i O n s 16 Secret Agent MAn Skin cells do more than just cover our bodies. As a neurology resident, Stanley Prusiner saw Creutzfeldt–Jakob agent began to emerge. These data established, for the first time, that Keratinocytes, for example, anchor immune cells disease kill a patient in a matter of months. Researchers knew the rare a particular macromolecule was required for infectivity and that this within the epidermis, move and proliferate during neurodegenerative disease and scrapie, a similar disease in sheep, macromolecule was a protein …. wound healing, and even secrete inhibitory molecules were infectious but not as a result of a typical virus.
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