« On the road to synthetic geckos | Main | Think twice, build once »

Amyloidogenic foie gras?

In their paper titled Amyloidogenic potential of foie gras, Solomon et al examine whether foie gras might have the potential to pass on amyloid conditions (diseases that involve protein plaques, similar to but not the same as "mad cow"). If you're wondering why they even thought of looking for this kind of thing, here's the key driver from their introduction:

AA amyloid deposits are commonly found in waterfowl, particularly Pekin ducks, in which the liver is predominately involved (8-10). This pathological alteration is noticeably increased in birds subjected to stressful environmental conditions as well as to the forced feeding that is used to produce foie gras (8).

The punchline is that yes, the amyloid in foie gras can induce amyloid conditions in internal organs of mice that are either injected with or fed the protein in question. This suggests, in turn, that foods with high amyloid content may contribute to amyloid conditions, much as prions in beef can lead to encephalopathies in humans.

About

This page contains a single entry from the blog posted on July 04, 2007 07:51 PM.

The previous post in this blog was On the road to synthetic geckos.

The next post in this blog is Think twice, build once.

Many more can be found on the main index page or by looking through the archives.