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| | Scrapie |
 | | Scrapie is referred to as a disease of protein conformation because it appears to be caused by the misfolding of a normal cellular protein, termed the prion protein, or PrP (Prusiner, 1982). |
 | | While scrapie was originally identified in sheep and goats, the prion diseases span from chronic wasting disease in deer and elk, bovine spongiform encephalopathy (BSE) of cattle, transmissible mink encephalopathy (TME), and several diseases in humans such as Kuru, Creutzfeldt-Jakob disease (CJD), Gerstmann- Straussler-Scheinker syndrome (GSS), and fatal familial insomnia (Gajdusek 1988). |
 | | The subsequent identification of a scrapie specific protein and generation of antibodies led to the identification of the prion protein in both infected and uninfected brains. |
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