With warm weather finally kicking in in New England, it was nice to get a Spring surprise in the form of a new paper on prions seeing the light of day.  Prions are particular kind of protein that propagate by imbuing an altered shape, or “confirmation”, on other proteins of the same type.  They essentially act as a kind of protein “zombie”, and there has been some speculation that they may support a kind of “memory function” due to their ability to transmit state across generations.  Prions were first discovered in the context of diseases like scrapie and variant Creutzfeldt–Jakob Disease (vCJD) but have shown up in all kinds of unexpected places, such as yeast and possibly – providing the aforementioned Spring suprise – plants.  Scientific American has a nice blog post on a recently-published study  from the Whitehead Institute, authored by Sohini Chakrabortee, Can Kayatekin, Greg…