An Interactive Annotated World Bibliography of Printed and Digital Works in the History of Medicine and the Life Sciences from Circa 2000 BCE to 2022 by Fielding H. Garrison (1870-1935), Leslie T. Morton (1907-2004), and Jeremy M. Norman (1945- ) Traditionally Known as “Garrison-Morton”

15961 entries, 13944 authors and 1935 subjects. Updated: March 22, 2024

NGUYEN, Hoang-Oanh B.

1 entries
  • 12836

Synthetic mammalian prions.

Science, 305, 673-676, 2004.

The authors modified Koch's Postulates within the context of prion disease. To do so the followed these steps:

1) They created recombinant mouse prion proteins in an E. coli and polymerized them.
2) They proved that these prion proteins were pure, and could not have any extraneous contaminating cellular or DNA/RNA material.
3) They injected these prion proteins aseptically into the brains of normal mice, fed them, reared them, and waited.
4) The mice developed neurologic dysfunction typical of a prion disease between 380 and 660 days after the injection.
5) Extracts from the brains of the mice were confirmed by Western blot analytic technique to be prionic in nature.
6) These abnormal prion proteins extracted from the mouse brains, when inoculated into and transmitted to other healthy mice, induced the typical neuropathological findings of the same prion illness.

(Order of authorship in the original publication: Legname, Baskakov, Nguyen....Prusiner.)

(Thanks to Juan Weiss for this reference and its interpretation.)



Subjects: INFECTIOUS DISEASE › GENERAL PRINCIPLES of Infection by Microorganisms, INFECTIOUS DISEASE › Prion Diseases