Mycosporine-like amino acids (MAAs) 처리에 따른 배양세포 내 스크래피 프리온 단백질의 형성증가

Abstract

Prions are proteinaceous infectious particles that cause neurodegenerative diseases, such as scrapie in sheep, bovine spongiform encephalopathy in cattle and Creutzfeldt-Jakob disease (CJD) in humans. Although the detailed process, regarding the abnormal conversion of prion proteins (PrP), remains to be fully elucidated, a number of environmental factors appear to affect the formation of misfolded PrP, termed PrPSc. Because oceanic algae contain mycosporine-like amino acids (MAAs), which exhibit cellular defensive activities under a variety of stress conditions, we investigated the level of PrPSc in prion-infected neuroblastoma cells using mycosporine-glycine, porphyra-334 and shinorine. When judged by the level of protease-resistant PrPSc in western blots, porphyra-334 and shinorine increased the level of PrPSc in cells, but mycosporine-glycine did not. The current results indicate that the MAAs tested in this study enhance the formation of PrPSc. © 2015, The Korean Society for Microbiology and Biotechnology.