Ricerc@Sapienza

Aims. Prion protein (PrPC), like many GPI-anchored protein, is found in sphingolipid-rich membrane microdomains known as lipid raft. This membrane-bound isoform dimerizes and can act as cell surface receptor, co-receptor or form multimolecular complexes and recruit downstream signal transduction pathways. As known, dimerization of membrane-bound PrPC leads to clustering in multimolecular complexes and serves to regulate different aspect of neuronal homeostasis, while intracellular dimerization appears to be the most relevant event in neuroprotection, via N1 and C1 prion metabolites.