Yeast find use for misfolded proteins
Clumps might help single-celled organisms adapt to hardship
http://www.sciencenews.org/view/generic/id/338486/title/Yeast_find_use_for_misfolded_proteins
I have talked about prions before and until I had read the article above I thought they were an evolutionary dead end since they only seemed to kill their ‘host’. Interestingly, they do appear to provide some evolutionary benefit, at least for yeast, which makes me wonder if is conceivable that prions secretly harbor some evolutionary benefit for humans as well. As an excellent example look into sickle cell anemia, it actually provides resistance to malaria if you are heterozygous (meaning you have one normal gene and one abnormal gene). It would be interesting to learn how mad cow disease can confer some sort of survival benefit (it certainly doesn’t for all those poor cows killed and burned in ditches), but that is the weird stuff I love about science.
