[jcims]

Combining a few recent HN topics. I bet you could reverse engineer a prion to develop the mRNA to create it. Pack that gene into something like SARS-CoV-2 that's highly transmissible but maybe not quite as loud in the body. Let it burp prions into your system while it's humming away then in a year or two a couple billion people die of spongebrain.

[blacksmith_tb]

I would take that bet, prions are proteins, they don't code for anything, they cause normally-shaped versions of the same protein to re-fold when they come into contact with them.

[jcims]

Sure but they are still made of amino acids and presumably could be translated from some sequence of mRNA. You might need to modify it slightly to provoke the alternate folding while still maintaining the essential infectious/auto-catalyzing structure.

[sterlind]

...and that's why I've been terrified of bioterrorism. your plan is simple and elegant and horrifying. making such viruses is getting easier every day. eventually it will be easy enough that some crank will do something like this. Jesus..

we should increase funding for developing pathogen sensors, and put them in public transportation hubs. eventually we'll probably start requiring saliva or nasal swabs from randomly-selected travelers. it sucks but I don't see a better way..

[jcims]

For anyone that isn’t aware: https://www.genscript.com/crispr-services.html

Gene-mods-R-Us! lol

Especially now that we can actually image individual proteins to help discover their structure: https://www.pnas.org/content/114/7/1474

I’m sure there are complications that make this much more difficult than it seems on the surface, but we should probably get that Mars thing going just in case haha.

[OnlyANeurosci]

Yeah, genetic constructs often don't work well even when you plan for them to work and are doing something "easy". It's not uncommon to have to try 10-30+ variations of adding a His-Tag to a protein (for purifying a protein product like say, insulin). There isn't a ton known about how prions are formed initially, which would be critical to designing one.