Sanders Brown Center on Aging, Department of Microbiology, Immunology and Molecular Genetics, University of Kentucky, Lexington, KY 40536, USA. gtell2@uky.edu
Studies of mammalian prion diseases such as bovine spongiform encephalopathy have suggested that different strains consist of prion proteins with different conformations. Two recent studies of yeast prions have now formally demonstrated that multiple stable protein conformations are the basis of strain variation.