The use of
streptomycin in the pathological
prion protein (PrP(sc)) detection procedures represents a new and attractive way for diagnostic purpose. With this agent, western blot readily detected PrP(sc) in 263K
scrapie hamster and C57Bl/6 wild-type mice challenged with C506M3
scrapie strain. Our aim was to evaluate this new diagnosis procedure in the field of human
transmissible spongiform encephalopathies (TSEs). First, we had confirmed the ability of
streptomycin to precipitate
PrP(res) from human brain of
Creutzfeldt-Jakob disease (CJD) patient. Second, we compared the detection of
PrP(res) with
streptomycin against three other protocols using other precipitations. Then we assessed
PrP(res) detection with
streptomycin in 98 brain tissue samples from various aetiologies of human TSEs and 52 brain samples from other
dementia. Finally, we applied this protocol for tonsils examination of five patients suspected of variant CJD (v-CJD). Sensitivity and specificity obtained with the
streptomycin protocol were both 100% on brain tissue. For tonsil tissues,
PrP(res) was clearly identified in the two post-mortem confirmed v-CJD cases, whereas no characteristic three-band pattern was seen in the three confirmed non-v-CJD samples. In this study,
streptomycin demonstrated its efficiency to detect
PrP(res) both in the central nervous system and in the lymphoid tissue without practical difficulty and with rapid preparation. Because of its ability to act as a good agent for PrP(sc) examination in different tissues, recovery of PrP(sc) in biological fluids using
streptomycin should open further perspectives of applications in CJD diagnostics.
Streptomycin effects in vivo might thus also be questioned.