A report on a Joint Cold Spring Harbor Laboratory/Wellcome Trust
Conference on 'Prion Biology', Hinxton, UK, 7-11 September 2005.
While most recent prion meetings have focused on either mammals
or fungi, the conference on prion biology held near Cambridge
this September stood out as an attempt to represent research on
mammalian and fungal prions equally, in order to provoke
discussion on fundamental questions of prion structure,
biogenesis, variability and biological role. Prions of lower
eukaryotes Over the past decade several infective proteins, or
prions, have been discovered in genetically tractable lower
eukaryotes, where they act like cytoplasmically inherited
genetic determinants. The opening talk of the meeting was
delivered by Reed Wickner (National Institutes of Health,
Bethesda, USA), who was the first to suggest 11 years ago that
the non-chromosomal genetic determinants known as [URE3] and
[PSI+] in the yeast Saccharomyces cerevisiae were in fact prion
proteins (enclosure in square brackets is the