Prion Diseases of Mammals and Yeast: Molecular Mechanisms and Genetic Features

An infectious protein, the prion is an altered form of a normal cellular protein that has lost its normal function, but has aquired the ability to change into this abnormal (prion) form. This volume reviews the development of the prion concept in the study of scrapie of sheep, kuru and Creutzfeldt-Jakob disease of man, and bovine spongiform encephalitis, and its recent extension to the non-Mendelian elements of Saccharmyces.