High pressure/temperature treatments to inactivate highly infectious prion subpopulations

High hydrostatic pressure can be used for gentle pasteurization of food as well as a physical parameter to study the stability and energetics of biomolecules. High pressure has been recently postulated as a feasible technology to decontaminate scrapie infectious materials. Here we discuss the kinetic parameters driving the inactivation of the Transmissible Spongiform Encephalopathy agents and the perspectives of pressure as a thermodynamic parameter to obtain a deeper insight into the aggregation of the 263K strain of scrapie. At 60–80 °C an efficient pressure inactivation of infectious scrapie prions was observed during short pressure treatments at 800 MPa (3×5 min cycles). However, discrepancies between in vivo infectivity counts and the results of an enzyme immunoassay further revealed that the infectivity was inactivated faster and much more efficiently than PrPres was degraded, indicating that pressure affects a highly infectious subpopulation of scrapie prions.