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Comment by netwanderer3 | Hacker News Reader

Is it possible that these prions were also acquired by human through meat consumption? As in the case with PrP prion from Mad Cow Disease which spread through meat eating as well. Another very similar case is by eating fruit bats containing toxic BMAA, which has a very similar structure to L-Serine amino acid causing it to be picked up instead during the protein synthesis process and resulting in a misfolded version. Studies are being done as BMAA could be a likely cause for many neurological disorders such as Parkinson's.

Has there ever been any researches in determining the rates of Alzheimer disease in meat eaters vs. vegetarians?

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Interesting topic. Here is an anecdote that I found through a simple web search that somewhat addresses your question:

"Few studies have looked carefully at the risk of dementia in vegetarians versus other people, and the data is contradictory. One small study of California residents found that meat eaters were more likely to become demented than their vegetarian counterparts. Another study in Alzheimer’s patients, however, found that adhering to a strict vegetarian diet resulted in lower cognition compared to a pescatarian diet (i.e., a diet that includes fish)."

https://www.alzdiscovery.org/cognitive-vitality/blog/vegetar...

You're right, I used to know a few vegetarians who often supplement their diets with Vitamin B-12 which theoretically could help boosting and balance their cognitive ability vs. meat eaters. I personally did not notice any cognitive problems in those people at least.

Our DNA contains the sequence of folding steps instruction for each protein to fold. So for a protein to misfold itself, could this mean it must have received an incorrect instruction from the source? As we know, damages to DNA are often a result of foreign agents or coming from external environmental factors. Prevention is always better than a cure so it is probably a lot easier to figure out the source and eliminate that rather than trying to change the structure of these molecules which is extremely difficult.

As I understand it, the DNA only contains the sequence of amino-acids from which the protein is built, not their folding instructions. Some proteins are also modified and/or cut in pieces by other proteins before reaching a functional state. Discovering how a protein folds, is a very complex problem, that would have been much easier if it were indeed encoded by the DNA. the website https://fold.it/portal/ gives a good introduction to the problem of protein folding.

My biochemistry education is 20 years old.. As you say DNA encodes the sequence of amino acids. Protein folding is a thermodynamic problem as parts of the protein stick to other parts and bonds try to achieve a low energy shape.

There are enzymes, co-enzymes, and other molecules that can help a protein to achieve its proper shape.

For many proteins, the sequence encodes the fold (many small proteins refold spontaneously with just their amino acid sequence). That proteases or other activations may be required to functionalize the protein is irrelevant- the sequence in the DNA causes the protein to fold to its preprotein state reversibly.

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