Fungi Make Large Number of prions

Ajouté : 2026-05-09

[00:00:00]Fungi contain pions and yes they make a lot of them. You might be familiar with pryions in the sense that they cause a lot of wacky things to happen in mammals. Yes, chronic wasting and deer that happens as well as mad cow and critzfield yakob syndrome. Let's talk about what a pryion is so we can understand it and that will maybe make more sense why we found it in so many different organisms. A pryion is a contagious protein. The easiest way to understand it and this is how it was first explained to me. proteins are kind of sticky on the inside and that's so that they can hold their structure and that sticky inside is not supposed to be on the outside. But if they get turned inside out, they can stick to each other and force other proteins to turn inside out and that can cause a lot of problems in a human brain. And it's even been found responsible for fatal familial insomnia. In humans, the PRP protein and various mutations of it can cause various problems, including never being able to sleep again. And technically, while fatal familial insomnia is genetic, if you, you know, ate meat that had it, you could then get fatal familial insomnia that was demonstrated in brain organoids, you don't have to have the gene mutation to be afflicted by it if you come in contact with the proteins. But let's get back to fungus.

[00:01:08]Fungi create these contagious proteins for a purpose. They have a cascading effect that infect other proteins and they change the way the fungi behave. So it might cause more mutations, for example, which is very helpful if you're reproducing in a harsh environment. Now you might question what happens if a human eats them. Not a lot. Since the discovery of contagious proteins in our own brain, they simply got that name.

[00:01:30]And now we are referring to all infectious proteins as pions. And that is a point of contention in the field.

[00:01:36]And I am not kidding. That is a conversation that is still happening because it kind of freaks people out. No contagious proteins seem to exist in complex life and they very likely exist in our own bodies. In fact, they've been implicated in learning and memory. Yes, having proteins that can change other proteins into the same confirmation is likely very helpful. And this could explain why we see conditions pop up because these genes and these proteins are in our bodies for a reason feasibly.

[00:02:01]And when something goes wrong, yeah, it can go very wrong and then you end up having plaques in your brain. Spongify, it's a fun word to say. Now, I am obligated to tell you this because it's been a little bit of a concern of mine.

[00:02:14]It is unlikely that chronic wasting will end up affecting people, at least right now. Now, there are two concerns about this and these are things that I am watching because they interest me and concern me. Scrapey was a form of pryion disease in sheep and then sheep were fed to cows and then cows were fed to cows and then cows were fed to us and that ended up affecting us. That's how we got mad cow disease. There could be a situation where something else is eating deer. We eat that something else and then it impacts us. That could happen with say bear. I mean hypothetically if we're talking about the food chain.

[00:02:48]There is also the big concern that there could be a small mutation in the PRP protein in deer and then it could infect us. So all of these are reasonable concerns. We don't have to go inventing scenarios. But fortunately folks at the CDC are watching this kind of thing. If it ever did come to that, that would be a major concern because you wouldn't have to eat deer to get it. Turns out plants can uptake pions and then if something eats a plant, they can then get infected with it. I'm going to start giving you guys a scale of how concerned I think you should be about this because this one I would say is a low concern for two reasons. People are studying it and are actively concerned that these things could happen. And the other reason is because it would be very hard to avoid it. If there actually were such an outbreak, it would be nearly impossible unless you're sticking to old canned food. Of course, it can take 20 years to show up. So, I I just don't think there's any avoiding it. But back to the original topic. Yes, fungi have pions, and you should not be worried about that. It just so happens to share a name with the ones that affect us in our own brains. They probably should rename them. I hope you've enjoyed this.

[00:03:59]Follow for more.