Kinetics of Prion Growth

Kinetics of prion growth.

We study the kinetics of prion fibril growth, described by the nucleated polymerization model analytically and by means of numerical experiments. The elementary processes of prion fibril formation lead us to a set of differential equations for the number of fibrils, their total mass, and the number of prion monomers. In difference to previous studies we analyze this set by explicitly taking int...

The kinetics of proteinase K digestion of linear prion polymers.

Transmissible spongiform encephalopathies such as scrapie are caused by a protein-only infectious agent, known as a prion. It is not clear how a protein can be capable of replicating itself, and the mechanism remains controversial. One influential model hypothesizes that prions are nucleated, macroscopically linear polymers. We investigated the theoretical kinetics of this model and derived pre...

The kinetics of growth.

A nanoparticle-based immobilization assay for prion-kinetics study

Magnetic and gold coated magnetic nanoparticles were synthesized by co-precipitation of ferrous and ferric chlorides, and by the micromicelles method, respectively. Synthesized nanoparticles were functionalized to bear carboxyl and amino acid moieties and used as prion protein carriers after carbodiimide activation in the presence of N-hydroxysuccinimide. The binding of human recombinant prion ...

Leuconostoc mesenteroides Growth Kinetics

Bacterial profile modification (BPM) is being developed as an oil recovery technique that uses bacteria to selectively plug oil depleted zones within a reservoir to divert displacing fluids (typically water) into oilrich zones. Leuconostoc mesenteroides, which produces dextran when supplied with sucrose, is a bacterium that is technically feasible for use in profile modification. However, the t...