News Genetics

Bank voles provide clue to prion disease susceptibility

Mice engineered with vole protein suffer disorders that don’t usually infect them

BLANK SLATE  Bank voles carry a version of a normal protein that makes them particularly susceptible to prion diseases, such as mad cow disease.

Peter Trimming/Flickr (CC BY 2.0)

By Tina Hesman Saey

- More than 2 years ago

Prion diseases, the frightening neuron-killing disorders that transmit via infectious proteins rather than by viruses or bacteria, rarely jump from one species to another.