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by kosievdmerwe 783 days ago
I'm of the opinion that prions occur more often than we know, it's just that to be a prion "disease", you need more properties than just spreading the misfolded shape.

Importantly a critical property is that it needs to be damaging enough to be noticeable and neural matter has the unfortunate property that it heals slowly (if at all) so low level damage can accummulate.

1 comments

Maybe, but even proving there's a second protein that does this in mammals would be a major discovery.