Practice question
Question
In modern medicine, certain severe neurological diseases, like Bovine Spongiform Encephalopathy (BSE), were found to be transmitted by agents consisting entirely of abnormally folded proteins. These are called:
Explanation
According to the latest additions in NCERT biology, 'prions' represent a highly unusual class of infectious agents. Unlike viruses or viroids which rely on nucleic acids, prions consist entirely of 'abnormally folded proteins' with no genetic material. When they enter a healthy brain, they induce normal proteins to misfold, leading to fatal neurodegenerative diseases like BSE (mad cow disease) in cattle and CJD in humans.
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