Cause of ALS is found, Northwestern team says

Re:Cause of ALS is found, Northwestern team says by niels_olson on Monday August 22, 2011 @03:45PM (#2913795)

Excepting prions, I'm not aware of any environmental factors changing a protein's function.

edit: regarding your comment below, the evidence in the Nature paper is fairly strongly in favor of a conformational change, though its all circumstantial evidence until they have a crystal structure.

I'm a doc, I'm all about environment influencing disease. I was primarily responding to what seemed to be an overly environmental view on your part. This article puts sime non-trivial evidence in the genetics camp.

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Re:Cause of ALS is found, Northwestern team says by linktylr on Monday August 22, 2011 @04:17PM (#2913937)

I'm not sure what you're getting at, but it's not necessary to change a protein's function in order for environmental factors to cause disease.

A leaky gut combined with cross-reactivity or molecular mimicry is sufficient to cause autoimmune diseases in some people.

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