Abstract
Chronic wasting disease (CWD) and scrapie can be transmitted through indirect environmental routes, possibly via soil, and a practical decontamination strategy for prion-contaminated soil is currently unavailable. In the laboratory, an enzymatic treatment under environmentally relevant conditions (22°C, pH 7.4) can degrade soil-bound PrPSc below the limits of Western blot detection. We developed and used a quantitative serial protein misfolding cyclic amplification (PMCA) protocol to characterize the amplification efficiency of treated soil samples relative to controls of known infectious titer. Our results suggest large (104- to >106-fold) decreases in soil-bound prion infectivity following enzyme treatment, demonstrating that a mild enzymatic treatment could effectively reduce the risk of prion disease transmission via soil or other environmental surfaces.
Original language | English (US) |
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Pages (from-to) | 4313-4317 |
Number of pages | 5 |
Journal | Applied and Environmental Microbiology |
Volume | 77 |
Issue number | 13 |
DOIs | |
State | Published - Jul 2011 |
All Science Journal Classification (ASJC) codes
- Biotechnology
- Food Science
- Applied Microbiology and Biotechnology
- Ecology