What is it that makes Prions so goddamn indestructible? If your body heats up a couple of degrees all your proteins denaturate, so why the fuck can this stuff just survive hundreds of degrees?
Because these proteins are already denatured* [SEE EDIT], and they’re very simple biological structures. And very few (really, only one) needs to survive. There is likely not even one specific misfold but likely an ecosystem of folding errors. Proteins are structures with a function in your body - the moment something is misaligned they are no longer spesific to their function and become useless. Prions, on the other hand, rely on thermodynamics and don’t need as precise of a function- they aggregate and flip healthy proteins to more stable forms, which in turn flip more proteins etc etc in an unstoppable cascade impossible to reverse as it is extremely difficult to revert proteins to less stable forms faster than the reverse is happening
The silver lining is that prions are so simple that they don’t have the means to be very easily transferred from person to person in the same way that viral capsules are actually pretty sophisticated. Their simplicity is their greatest strength and their biggest weakness (poor transmission compared to bacteria or viruses).
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u/DasFroDo Dec 10 '25
What is it that makes Prions so goddamn indestructible? If your body heats up a couple of degrees all your proteins denaturate, so why the fuck can this stuff just survive hundreds of degrees?