Department of Civil Engineering, 203B Peter Kiewit Institute, University of Nebraska-Lincoln, Omaha, NE 68182-0178, USA.
Appl Environ Microbiol. 2011 Jul;77(13):4313-7. doi: 10.1128/AEM.00421-11. Epub 2011 May 13.
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 (10(4)- to >10(6)-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.
慢性消耗病（CWD）和瘙痒病可以通过间接的环境途径传播，可能通过土壤，目前还没有针对朊病毒污染土壤的实用去污策略。在实验室中，在环境相关条件（22°C，pH7.4）下进行酶处理可以将土壤结合的 PrPSc 降解至 Western blot 检测限以下。我们开发并使用了定量连续蛋白错误折叠循环扩增（PMCA）方案，以相对于已知感染滴度的对照来表征处理后土壤样品的扩增效率。我们的结果表明，酶处理后土壤结合的朊病毒感染性大大降低（10（4）至> 10（6）倍），表明温和的酶处理可以有效降低通过土壤或其他环境表面传播朊病毒病的风险。
