Prions Found in Plants

Wrote this for another thread but it belongs here. As far as "natural evolutionary processes" go, my pet theory is that disease is part of an adaptive chain or "cascade," simplified (quick and dirty) as follows:
1. The environment or elements of it change;
2. Nanomolecules like amino acids respond by changing;
3. Macromolecules like proteins respond in turn by changing or "misfolding" to adapt to the changed environment;
4. The newly modified proteins share their adaptive structure and attendant properties with other proteins (ie., infect them on contact);
5. Viruses and bacteria take on these new proteins, and
6. Spread them around to more complex lifeforms; and
7. Eventually it all comes out in the wash and everything and everyone shares the same basic amino acid and protein building blocks that are adapted to the changed environment.

NOTE: The mistake made in earlier scientific study was to consider only the chemistry - in fact, the chemistry does not change, only the structure - but turns out, structure determines properties when it comes to nano- and macro- molecules.


Of Interest:

An amino acid code for protein folding

I'm back to this now. I understand the disease but would like to know what could be done to halt or reverse the progression of prion disease in humans. Have you any ideas from your research Softcrow? I am sure that if our bodies would destroy the damaged cells and replace them with new and at the same time if something slowed the development of new prions it would help. Keeping the liver functioning properly would be a must and making sure not to eat foods that kill or retard macrophages would be a must. Maybe some milk thistle or dandelions would keep the liver and kidneys strong. Adequate salt or other minerals that promote oxidation of damaged cells may be a help. I can't seem to find any information on treatments to find a medicine to backwards research it to use. I guess I need to go watch to see what a healthy deer eats. I could go watch the cows browse in the fields for a few days.

It does seem that the government and medical industry are avoiding this issue in Humans. I guess they feel that to let out too much information would allow people to find how to neutralize the effects of these prions.

Here is some information that applies to this thread. www.sciencedaily.com...

reply to post by rickymouse


Thanks. S& : up : I agree with the following conclusion - and think we'd be served best by looking at the things we've introduced into our environment that cause so many protein folding errors. It's Western to attack problems, Eastern to prevent them.

...scientists believe that hope primarily lies not in dismantling them, but in heading off the folding errors.

reply to post by soficrow


I'm getting a bad feeling about all of this. They have culled out all the normal chickens and favored chickens that grow super fast, if they live more than ten weeks they start having heart attacks. Are these proteins folding right? The old belief was that a misfolded protein was not harmful because it was not absorbed or utilized by the body so they ignored them. There was no evidence to back their assumption that it was safe, only the perception of some scientists who worked for the people that were profiting by this information and I doubt if the FDA actually even investigated if this was real.

We have a mess here that goes back over fifty years.

reply to post by rickymouse

We have a mess here that goes back over fifty years.

I'm thinkin' the beginning of the Industrial Revolution. Remember, LaMarck was tracking the effects of environmental contaminants on workers. He didn't get it quite right, but current technology now shows real epigenetic effects.

reply to post by rickymouse

... I understand the disease but would like to know what could be done to halt or reverse the progression of prion disease in humans. Have you any ideas from your research Softcrow?

I don't think we serve ourselves best by focusing on "halting or reversing" the disease process because I strongly believe the process is adaptive and evolutionary. As I explained above. Sucks I know. But given that we continue contaminating our planet's environment, and our own bodies' environments, then such natural adaptive processes as prion formation look to be our best chance at species survival.

reply to post by soficrow


You would think that misfolded proteins being present would mean another proper protein would be needed to complete the process, so the bigger the plant or animal than it's normal size, the more possibility of their being misfolded proteins. In the case of the chickens I was talking about above, are these proteins created by the culling of normal chickens a mutation involving misfolded proteins? I see lots of possibilities. If the proteins aren't folding right, the muscles will be soft and weak, but still be meat. I am sort of questioning if the tender meat is made of misfolded or incompletely developed proteins, rending their proper use in our consumption of them very poor. I remember back in the seventies that active people would eat normally about fifteen hundred calories and be satisfied. Nowadays the recommendations are much higher. I think there are problems with a lot of the foods not being able to be properly digested. Some people have problems if these proteins get digested and enter the body. If this is true, I see a lot of problems in everyone's future from consumption of them. If our bodies start to digest them in a couple of generations of use, sickness will become the new economic giant. This is good for the people that are designing the practice, because they also sell medicines to treat the problems. I think that more is known about this than we can comprehend. I see that people can make their services necessary by causing the problem over many years. Their workers may not even know what is gone, people are trained in specialties and cannot see the whole picture.

rickymouse
reply to post by soficrow

 

You would think that misfolded proteins being present would mean another proper protein would be needed to complete the process,

Why do you think that? (I don't.) [Ed. to add: sorry - now realize you mean disease process - yes, prions need proteins to infect.]

... so the bigger the plant or animal than it's normal size, the more possibility of their being misfolded proteins.

Why? We've already established that proteins misfold in response to environmental change. Size of organism does not seem relevant at all. In fact, proteins exist and misfold in the absence of organism. [Ed. to add: But you're right - the larger the "pool" of proteins to infect, the more prions there will be.]

...I am sort of questioning if the tender meat is made of misfolded or incompletely developed proteins, rending their proper use in our consumption of them very poor.

Now that sounds logical to me - seems to me that growth hormones and other ones used in commercial food animals work by misfolding proteins.

...If our bodies start to digest them in a couple of generations of use, sickness will become the new economic giant.

Sickness is the economic giant now - Big Pharma is at least neck and neck with Big Oil for 1st place. But if nothing changes (environmentally as in food), we might hope for adaptation.

reply to post by rickymouse


Heads up. Did some edits. See above.

I was just watching a short segment on mad cow disease and they stated that all the cows that were destroyed in the UK were burned to stop the disease. But what they said that I hadn't heard before was that the bone ash of the destroyed cows was turned into fertilizer and shipped to about 70 different countries. I would think this would be a big boost to finding prions in plants.

All this caught my attention as we just had a death in our area from the human version. I did not know the person but she was a neighbor of a friend of mine. Kinda made me stop and think.

reply to post by TXTriker

..what they said that I hadn't heard before was that the bone ash of the destroyed cows was turned into fertilizer and shipped to about 70 different countries. I would think this would be a big boost to finding prions in plants.

Yes, definitely. Reminds me of Dutch Elm Disease, and the proscription on burning contaminated wood - also reminds me of Tobacco Mosaic, and makes me wonder if commercial tobacco products are often contaminated with diseased leaves and stems.

I was doing a bit of background research and discovered a news report about Doctor Huber's hypothesis that GMO tinkering and/or the Roundup herbicide (glyphosate herbicide) might have triggered the appearance of a new prion. Seems entirely predictable to me.

Various studies report increased diseases linked to use of Roundup and GMO - including spontaneous abortions in livestock, sudden death syndrome in Monsanto’s Roundup Ready soy, and wilt in Monsanto’s RR corn, infertility and spontaneous abortions over the past few years in US cattle, dairy, swine, and horse operations. "In Argentina and Paraguay, doctors and residents living in GM soy producing areas have reported serious health effects from glyphosate spraying, including high rates of birth defects as well as infertility, stillbirths, miscarriages, and cancers. Scientific studies collected in the new report confirm links between exposure to glyphosate and premature births, miscarriages, cancer, and damage to DNA and reproductive organ cells."

Huber's critics main point is that glyphospates should not be singled out as more responsible than other chemicals. Okay.

Scientists warn of link between dangerous new pathogen and Monsanto’s Roundup

A plant pathologist experienced in protecting against biological warfare recently warned the USDA of a new, self-replicating, micro-fungal virus-sized organism which may be causing spontaneous abortions in livestock, sudden death syndrome in Monsanto’s Roundup Ready soy, and wilt in Monsanto’s RR corn.

...“I believe we’ve reached the tipping point toward a potential disaster with the safety of our food supply. The abuse, or call it over use if you will, of Roundup, is having profoundly bad consequences in the soil. We’ve seen that for years. The appearance of this new pathogen may be a signal that we’ve gone too far.”

...Huber highlighted “the escalating frequency of infertility and spontaneous abortions over the past few years in US cattle, dairy, swine, and horse operations.”

...Argentine scientists found that Roundup causes birth defects in frogs and chickens. Publishing their paper, “Glyphosate-Based Herbicides Produce Teratogenic Effects on Vertebrates by Impairing Retinoic Acid Signaling,” in Chemical Research in Toxicology, Alejandra Paganelli, et al. also produced a large set of reports for the public at GMWatch:

In Argentina and Paraguay, doctors and residents living in GM soy producing areas have reported serious health effects from glyphosate spraying, including high rates of birth defects as well as infertility, stillbirths, miscarriages, and cancers. Scientific studies collected in the new report confirm links between exposure to glyphosate and premature births, miscarriages, cancer, and damage to DNA and reproductive organ cells.

One of the researchers, Andrés Carrasco, told GM Watch, “The findings in the lab are compatible with malformations observed in humans exposed to glyphosate during pregnancy.”

...In a 2009 study, researchers linked organ damage with consumption of Monsanto’s GM maize, based on Monsanto’s trial data. As we reported last year, Gilles-Eric Séralini, et al., concluded that the raw data from all three GMO studies reveal that novel pesticide residues will be present in food and feed and may pose grave health risks to those consuming them.

A new disease from plants – is it a prion?

(Looks like it is to me.)