Date of Award
Fall 12-15-2012
Document Type
Thesis
Degree Name
Bachelor of Science (BS)
Department
Biology
College
College of Science
First Advisor
Michael Pierce
Abstract/Description
Prions are infections proteins that are auto-catalyzing (form by altering a regular protein into the structurally different prion form), and are the cause of many common diseases such as Alzheimer's, Parkinson's, Huntington's, and Bovine Spongiform encephalopathy (or Mad Cow disease). This experiment tested the effect of three different plasmids, pH317, pER62 and pmp46 on prion formation in both wild-type and Urm1 deletion mutants in the yeast Saccharomyces cerevisiae. The proposed hypothesis was overexpression of the prion forming protein would increase the frequency of prion formation, as well as yield less sustainable prion amyloids (or prion aggregations) that are easier to cure. Another purpose of this experiment is to investigate how the presence or absence of the URM1 gene, that can form a prion, affects the overall formation of prions. The data showed both that overexpression of proteins was seen to increase prion formation, and that overexpression yielded prions that were less sustainable across generations. Also shown was that deletion mutants yielded higher numbers of prions than their wild-type counterparts. Efforts to cure prions through use of overexpression and guanidine, which inhibits the chaperone proteins associated with dividing prions during cellular division, proved inconclusive because there was no visible difference between any of the three plasmids.
Creative Commons License
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Recommended Citation
Beaver, Jacob, "The Influence of Ubiquitin-Related Modifier Protein URM1 on Prion Formation" (2012). Honors Theses. 48.
https://digitalcommons.coastal.edu/honors-theses/48