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The Hamilton, Montana, National Institute of Health’s Rocky Mountain Laboratory makes brain-wasting find

New research conducted by the National Institute of Health’s Rocky Mountain Laboratories in Hamilton may shed some new light on the inner-workings of brain-wasting diseases, including Alzheimer’s disease.

Byron Caughey, a senior investigator at the lab, and his partner, Gerald Baron, recently discovered how bad proteins, which cause diseases such as mad cow and chronic wasting in deer and elk, travel through brain cells.

And they simultaneously discovered that the bad protein, technically called prions, that causes Alzheimer’s travels the same way through brain cells.

"If you learn about how these infectious agents are transported, it can suggest ways of preventing that spread," Caughey said. "We’re excited to finally be able to see, almost in real time, the process by which these infectious chunks of protein can invade cells."

By ALLISON FARRELL
Gazette State Bureau

Full Story: http://www.billingsgazette.com/index.php?id=1&display=rednews/2005/05/25/build/state/60-brain-wasting.inc

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RML scientists give proteins a fluorescent flair
Dye-job opens doors to more advancements in brain-wasting disease research
by JENNY JOHNSON – Ravalli Republic

Scientists for the first time watched agents of brain-wasting diseases thanks to work by researchers at Hamilton’s Rocky Mountain Laboratories.

The breakthrough, published Wednesday in the Journal of Neuroscience, allows scientists to watch cells thought to cause transmissible spongiform encephalopathies – chronic wasting disease in deer and elk, mad cow disease in cattle, scrapie in sheep and Creutzfeldt-Jacob disease in humans – as they enter brain cells.

The findings will help scientists better understand this group of diseases and may lead to ways of preventing or minimizing its effects.

Researchers attached fluorescent dye to the prion proteins, allowing them to watch the cells as they entered and moved around brain cells.

"It gives us a better handle on how the process occurs," said Gerald Baron, scientist in the persistent viral diseases lab at RML, a division of the National Institute of Allergy and Infectious Diseases.

Full Story: http://www.ravallinews.com/articles/2005/05/26/news/news04.txt

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