Common Soil Mineral Degrades The Nearly Indestructible Prion

In the rogues' gallery of microscopic infectious agents, the prion is the toughest hombre in town. Warped pathogens that lack both DNA and RNA, prions are believed to cause such fatal brain ailments as chronic wasting disease (CWD) in deer and moose, mad cow disease in cattle, scrapie in sheep and Creutzfeldt-Jakob disease in humans. Now researchers have found that a common soil mineral, an oxidized from of manganese known as birnessite, can penetrate the prion's armor and degrade the protein.

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