1.

Improvement of available and development of new methods for diagnosis of prion disease

‘Mad cow disease’, one of prion diseases, caused great economic loss at the end of the last century. The possibility of transmission to people, long incubation period and transmission by blood transfusion are still posing threat to general public. While validated tests can only be used post mortem, we managed to characterize new reagents and exploit new technologies capable of detecting infectivity and surrogate markers. On conference Prion 2008 we presented applicability of small fluorescent compounds for detection of PrP structural conversion.

F.22 Improvement to existing health/diagnostic methods/procedures

COBISS.SI-ID: 4055578

2.

Disulfide tethers define the segments undergoing conformational change upon prion protein conversion (PrP)

Despite three awarded Nobel prizes related to prion diseases the key unanswered question is the identification of specific structural segments that undergo rearrangement in PrP conversion. We used an original approach by rigidifying selected structural segments of PrP by disulfide tethers and following their effect on conversion. In contrast to most published structural models our results showed that the majority of secondary structure elements remain intact, which is also important in designing new therapies. Krka Prize 2008 was awarded for PhD thesis describing these results.

E.01 National awards

COBISS.SI-ID: 4042266