prion

views updated

prion Infective agent that appears to consist simply of a protein. Prions are thought to cause diseases such as Creutzfeldt-Jakob disease (CJD) and kuru in humans, bovine spongiform encephalopathy (BSE) in cattle, and scrapie in sheep. It is not yet understood how prions work; unlike viruses and bacteria, they do not contain dna or rna. A virus is a hundred times larger than a prion. The US neurologist Stanley Prusiner won the 1997 Nobel Prize for developing the prion theory in 1982.

More From encyclopedia.com