prions and immune response

[Mike Poidinger]

JARDINE  P <F3CM at UNB.CA> wrote:

>To those still brave enough to wade through the Ebola posts:

>I was thinking about prions and the ability of a host to generate an
>immune response. Is there a detectable antibody titre in hosts which
>have been exposed to the prion?

Sometimes.  Never very good, if it is there at all.  

>Technically, if the prion is really a rogue cellular peptide, it
>would not ellicit an immune response since it would be auto-immune.

True.

>However, if the PrP (Sc) has a different conformation from the PrP
>(C) as is speculated, would this provide sufficient epitomes of
>"foreign" appearance for the humoral system to kick in.

(epitope, not epitome)... If it did then they would but since they don't it
doesn't.  Or more lengthily,  If the PrP conformation was different enough it
would generate a humoral response.  But since we do not see much of a humoral
response, obviosuly in this case there is not enough of a difference.

And as a previous poster pointed out, despite extensive efforts, we are unable
to generate poly or mono clonal sera which differentiates between c and sc.
Indeed, you are lucky if the sera raised can differentiate between PrP from
different species, let alone disease vs normal.

Mike


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Dr Mike Poidinger      Now don't be lazy, 
Microbiology, UQ       with the pleasure of sin  (Nitzer Ebb)
Australia              
mikep at biosci.uq.oz.au  
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