Transmissible spongiform encephalopathies.

Scrapie, bovine spongiform encephalopathy (BSE), and the Creutzfeldt-Jakob disease (CJD) belong to a group of lethal neurodegenerative disorders in mammals. Prion diseases or transmissible spongiform encephalopathies (TSEs) are characterized by the accumulation of an abnormal isoform (PrPSc) of the host-encoded cellular prion protein (PrPC) in the brain. The infectious agent, the 'prion,' is believed to be devoid of informational nucleic acid and to consist largely, if not entirely, of PrPSc. The PrP isoforms contain identical amino acid sequences yet differ in their overall secondary structure with the PrPSc isoform possessing a higher beta-sheet and lower alpha-helix content than PrPC. Elucidation of the three-dimensional structure of PrPC has provided important clues on the molecular basis of inherited human TSEs and on the species barrier phenomenon of TSEs. Nevertheless, the molecular mechanism of the conformational rearrangement of PrPC into PrPSc is still unknown, mainly due to the lack of detailed structural information on PrPSc. Within the framework of the 'protein only' hypothesis, two plausible models for the self-replication of prions have been suggested, the conformational model and the nucleation-dependent polymerization model.