导读：近日，来自爱丁堡大学的研究人员通过研究揭示了感染性蛋白如何引发疾病扩散到大脑，这或可帮助对致死性大脑疾病的患者进行诊断，相关研究发表于国际杂志Journal of Virology上。文章中研究者表示，个体在食用被感染性蛋白—朊病毒污染的食物后，朊病毒就会通过肠道侵入到个体大脑，该研究或将帮助对朊病毒疾病的诊断，朊病毒疾病包括克雅二氏症及疯牛病等。
Prion diseases are infectious neurodegenerative disorders characterised by accumulations of abnormally folded cellular prion protein in affected tissues. Many natural prion diseases are acquired orally and following exposure the early replication of some prion isolates upon follicular dendritic cells (FDC) within gut-associated lymphoid tissues (GALT) is important for the efficient spread of disease to the brain (neuroinvasion). Prion detection within large intestinal GALT biopsies has been used to estimate human and animal disease prevalence. However, the relative contributions of the small and large intestinal GALT to oral prion pathogenesis were unknown. To address this issue we created mice that specifically lacked FDC-containing GALT only in the small intestine. Our data show that oral prion disease susceptibility was dramatically reduced in mice lacking small intestinal GALT. Although these mice had FDC-containing GALT throughout their large intestines, these tissues were not early sites of prion accumulation or neuroinvasion. We also determined whether pathology specifically within the large intestine might influence prion pathogenesis. Congruent infection with the nematode parasite Trichuris muris in the large intestine around the time of oral prion exposure did not affect disease pathogenesis. Together, these data demonstrate that the small intestinal GALT are the major early sites of prion accumulation and neuroinvasion after oral exposure. This has important implications for our understanding of the factors that influence the risk to infection and the pre-clinical diagnosis of disease.