Are any animals immune to prion diseases?

Answer 1

What was once an oddity is now being understood as a nerve disease caused by a commonly found misfolded protein made by a gene in DNA, This is a common gene is seen in yeast to mammals. So to get to your question, I don't think that there will be any animal immune to prions.

Prion diseases are caused by misfolded forms of the prion protein, also known as PrP. These diseases affect a lot of different mammals in addition to humans and even yeast. There is Scrapie in sheep, mad cow disease in cows, and chronic wasting disease in deer. Creutzfeldt-Jakob disease

(CJD), fatal familial insomnia (FFI), Gertsmann-Straussler-Scheinker syndrome (GSS),

Kuru and variably protease-sensitive prionopathy (VPSPr) are found in humans. There was a famous epidemic of Kuru, a prion disease which was passed from person to person by cannibalism (eating the brains of the dead). Fatal familial insomnia are also prions found in humans.

Over the past several years, it's increasingly common to hear people use the term "prion" to refer to amyloid beta (the protein involved in Alzheimer's), alpha synuclein (the culprit in Parkinson's Disease).

In each disease, the prion protein (PrP) folds up the wrong way, becoming a prion, and then causes other PrP molecules to do the same. Prions can then spread "silently" across the brain for years without causing any symptoms. Then it starts to kill neurons.

Everyone has a gene called PRNP which codes for the protein called PrP, and most of the time this protein is perfectly healthy and fine. Some people have mutations in the DNA of their PRNP gene, which cause it to produce mutant forms of PrP. These mutant forms don't form prions instantly, and most people with PRNP mutations live perfectly healthy for decades. But as people get older, the

mutant forms of PrP are more and more likely to fold up the wrong way and form prions.

Once they do, the person has a rapid neurodegenerative disease.