Prion puts yeast cells under arrest

Despotic partner choice puts helpers under pressure?

The authors of the target paper (Bergmüller et al., 2007) try o bring order into the many forms ‘cooperation’ takes in the atural world by designing a decision tree, most branches of hich have endpoints well known from the cooperation literaure. The advantage of this exercise is that it helps to classify atural phenomena into the correct pigeonhole and relate it to ther natural phenomena of the...

ThumbPod Puts Security Under your Thumb

digital alter ego is almost as important as your physical self. Your digital identity, usually comprising a series of electronic records, determines whether you can buy a car, get a loan, or open a bank account. Yet the link between your physical and digital selves is surprisingly weak and insecure. Identity theft and credit card fraud are ubiquitous. Indeed, we have grown used to verification ...

Assembly of the yeast prion

Modelling prion dynamics in yeast

The word prion was coined by Nobel laureate Stanley Prusiner to describe the infectious agent in a group of fatal neurodegenerative diseases that includes scrapie in sheep, bovine spongiform encephalopathy (BSE) in cattle and variant Creutzfeldt-Jakob disease (vCJD) in humans. The infectious agent is a misfolded form of the protein, PrP, denoted PrPSc, which forms polymers that grow by recruiti...

A Prion in yeast Huntington's disease

Huntingtin-like proteins make yeast sick (bottom). eriin et al., reporting on page 997, have developed the first yeast model for studying Huntington's disease. Yeast cannot undergo neurodegeneration, of course, but the simplicity and genetic manipulability of the system are already providing important mechanistic insights. The authors report that aggregation of a polypeptide with an expanded po...