r/science • u/FreeHugs23 • 1d ago
Neuroscience Scientists observed human dementia-related proteins spreading through mouse brains in a prion-like manner, providing new evidence for how neurodegenerative diseases may progress through neural networks.
https://www.sciencealert.com/scientists-watched-human-dementia-proteins-spread-through-mouse-brains-like-prions143
u/FreeHugs23 1d ago
-Prions are one of nature's cruelest tricks.
Proteins are chains of amino acids that need to fold in very specific ways – a process that does not always work as intended. Your body is pretty good at correcting these errors – but every so often, a prion emerges.
This isn't just a crooked, non-functional protein. It's a gnarly shape that shares instructions for how it got that way, while resisting the body's clean-up mechanisms. As these instructions spread through the brain, the result is rapid, progressive degeneration and, ultimately, death.
For years, scientists have noticed eerie similarities between prion diseases and many neurodegenerative conditions, such as Alzheimer's, Parkinson's, and corticobasal degeneration (CBD).
Both involve molecular misfolding – and there is mounting evidence that, like prions, misfolded proteins associated with these diseases can seed the misfolding and aggregation of other proteins, allowing the pathology to propagate through the brain.
But one crucial piece of the puzzle has been missing.
There was no direct evidence that the misfolded tau proteins involved in diseases such as Alzheimer's were passing on the blueprint for their particular horrible architecture.
Now, researchers led by structural biologist Sjors Scheres and neuroscientist Michel Goedert of the MRC Laboratory of Molecular Biology in the UK have found it.
They injected human tau proteins from individuals with Alzheimer's disease and CBD into mice – and found the mice's own tau proteins copying the introduced misfolds.
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u/ngetch 1d ago
I had been sleeping pretty well lately, so... thanks for ruining that.
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u/GraziTheMan 1d ago
Ironically, getting good quality sleep is shown to potentially prevent the onset of some neurodegenerative conditions, as the delta phase sleep induces pulsing waves of CSF through the brain, helping to remove built up Tau proteins, ROS and other things that shouldn't be there.
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u/EvilDraakje 22h ago
Can I pulse these waves through my body whilst I'm not sleeping ? Sounds useful.
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u/GraziTheMan 17h ago
Lots of people certainly seem to think so. The CIA invested in the Monroe Institute's Gateway Tapes for some time. They were more looking to induce remote viewing and other "psychic" type phenomena, I believe, but look into "binaural beats" or "isochronic audio." I actually asked Claude Code to make me a native Android App recently so I could build my own Binaural beat sessions.
But the idea is you use binaural audio tones to induce various cortical loop states, and Delta phase is definitely present in all of the binaural audio programs I've seen.
So at risk of mansplaining something you already know: if you plan a specific audio tone in one ear (usually the left), say: 200hz, and then play a very similar tone that is only a few hz higher, say 210hz, your brain interprets the difference (10hz in this case) as a third tone; provided each ear is entirely isolated.
This is significant because the ear can't really pick up on a frequency that low at normal volumes, but more importantly: it can entrain the brain to match that frequency. So you start it out at an alpha frequency, which is where your brain is while awake, and then slowly over many minutes, bring the tone of the right ear closer and closer to the tone of the left ear until it's only about 1-2hz higher. This is Delta phase range, and if done right, can induce delta phase cortical loops.
tl;dr: maybe
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u/EvilDraakje 11h ago
Cool. So these audios with whatever waves actually help ? As in, studying as well etc ? Or is that too far fetched ?
Seems interesting tho thanks.
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u/GraziTheMan 10h ago
I believe so. For something like studying, you would want the body to be relaxed and the mind to be awake. This would require multiple tones to be introduced as the audio progresses. Probably Alpha as the main tone and then beta and then gamma
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u/Sus-Imposter-67 7h ago
I actually asked Claude Code to make me a native Android App recently so I could build my own Binaural beat sessions
This is why reddit is my favorite comedy website
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u/ishitar 19h ago
Yes, do deep belly breathing, core engagement, and gentle spinal movements. It can sympathetically pulse CSF through the brain while awake.
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u/EvilDraakje 11h ago
Is this like yoga or pilates ? Or similar ?
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u/GraziTheMan 3h ago
I'd say that what they are describing with deep belly breathing and core engagement is more along the lines of neigong or qigong as they are meditative disciplines in addition to focusing on body positioning and breathing. "Binaural beats" or "Isochronic Tones" are two interesting methods for using sound alone to entrain brainwaves for specific purposes
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u/Nellasofdoriath 1d ago
What I don't understand is why the prions are so resistant to heat. Other proteins will cook in boiling water as in an egg or a hotdog, so why are prions so special
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u/x1uo3yd 20h ago
A lot of nuance gets lost when people repeat a conflation of half-remembered factoids.
Yes, the good version of the protein with a more alpha-helical structure is less thermodynamically stable than the doppleganger version with its tightly linked beta sheets... but no, those beta sheets don't suddenly make it indestructable. It'll still denature given enough heat/time/etc. like any other proteins with comparable configurations of tight beta sheets.
However, you also have to keep in mind risk-tolerance and economics.
If someone with a common cold sneezes on your phone screen you're probably fine with wiping it off with any kind of cleaner that advertises it "kills 99.9% of germs" or whatever, but on the other hand if that person has something Ebola-level scary then suddenly 99.9% doesn't seem remotely thorough enough. Furthermore, even if a series of multiple cleaning treatments killed 70% of 90% of 99.9% of 80% of germs such that it works out to something like 99.9994%, and you find that to be an acceptable risk level, that does not mean that the whole series of procedures was necessarily worth the cost compared to just sending your files to the cloud and incinerating it for a new phone.
When you combine all those facts, you basically have it that standard denaturation protocols that denature 99.9% of regular proteins are basically killing the stronger bad prions at only like a 90% rate, and the scariness level of bad prion diseases means you'd really rather work things out at a 99.9999999% level or something but the amount of additional time/procedures/complexity makes that kinda infeasible compared to simply incinerating all the scalpels and gloves and everything and just treating it as if it were T-9000 level indestructible.
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u/MrUsername0 18h ago
That’s not even close to true about how prions work.
They are problematic because they aggregate. They clump together and typically degeneration pathways have a harder time digesting larger deposits.
A prion also causes the same normally folded protein to take the misfolded shape. Hence they also self propagate.
Both features together are the problem.
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u/x1uo3yd 14h ago
That’s not even close to true about how prions work... They are problematic because they aggregate. They clump together and typically degeneration pathways have a harder time digesting larger deposits... A prion also causes the same normally folded protein to take the misfolded shape. Hence they also self propagate... Both features together are the problem.
Are you replying to the wrong comment?
I'm not talking about how prions work, I'm talking about why they're often described as-if autoclaves cannot denature them. (In that, although they are significantly more heat resistant, they are not literally invulnerable.)
Yes, you are correct that prions are infectious (and scary) because they misfold the host organism's own good PrPC into bad PrPSc which goes on to generate a chain-reaction of misfolding into more and more infectious prion versions.
Yes, you are correct that prions are harder for the body's usual protein recycling systems to digest, owing both to PrPSc having a particularly hard-to-latch-onto-to-cleave folded shape as well as the compounding problem of dense aggregations.
Yes, both of those things are problems which contribute to why prion diseases are scary.
No, neither of those things have anything to do with thermal denaturation in an autoclave.
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u/Spire_Citron 13h ago
Does this mean that we could potentially train the immune system to target those misfolded proteins?
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u/harry_manback- 1d ago
If we're as close to a cure for Alzheimer's as we are to prion diseases, we can forget it.
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u/VlLLVGE 1d ago
Prion ASOs are actually looking very promising and beginning phase 1/2a trials now. A similar approach is being investigated for AD-like diseases that deposit mostly tau aggregates.
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u/witty_user_ID 1d ago
Oh, fascinating (and as someone with a father with dementia and a grandmother who died from it, potentially some real skin in the game) would you mind sharing some links?
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