1. How are Alzheimer's disease and Fatal Familial Insomnia (FFI) similar?
They are both degenerative of the brain and both contain the amyloid plaques. They are also found mainly in people that are aging with the four stages including phobias and hallucinations.
2. What are prions?
Prions are protein segments that could cause infection that may lead to some forms of dementia. Currently all prion diseases are untreatable and thought to be fatal. In some fungi, proteins showing prion-type behavior are also found and this had been quite important in helping to understand prions in mammals. However, fungal prions do not appear to cause disease in their hosts and may even give an evoluntionary advantage through a form of protein-based inderitance.
3. So can this disorder be acted on by natural selection? What about Alzheimer's? What is maintaining these disorders in the population?
FFI and Alzheimer's cannot be acted on by natural selection because the affects are after child bearing years in which potentially affected individuals may have already had children that may also be potentially affected. To maintain these disorders in the population, different techniques can be used to detect the defective gene in FFI yet in Alzheimer's scientist are not sure if its heritable.
4. How can studying protein folding and mis-folding help in understanding disease like these?
First off studying cattle would be good because it would give us a good source for studying evolutionary analysis compared with humans because they are homologous. By looking at Mad Cow disease and other degenerative syndromes in humans we can understand why accumulation of abnormal cleavage and glutamine develops. We can also understand mis-folding by knowing why plaques and tangles occur.
5. Would each of you want to know whether or not you had a disease such as this, or would you rather remain unaware?
We would definitely want to know so we could live life to the fullest and spend quality time with our family and friends. Also, we would know not to pass it on to our offspring, therefore we would not be affecting our children so they don't have to go through the same disorder.
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Your answers were good but often insufficient to thoroughly answer the questions and effectively relate the reading to class material. Thank you for your honesty in answering the last question. In total, you earned a 36 out of 50 for this assignment. Please talk to me if you have any questions. Your next blog entry needs to tell me briefly what EACH of you learned about your topic from this paper and, collectively, why it's important for a doctor to know about evolution (Chpater 14 and info on WebCT might help). Also, be sure to thank your interviewee and refer them to your blog if you haven't already.
Good job,
Dr. Walker
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