ABSTRACT
Prion diseases are infectious and fatal neurodegenerative diseases. The pathogenic agent is an abnormal prion protein aggregate. Microglial activation in the centre nervous system is a characteristic feature of prion disease. In this study, we examined the effect of PrP 106-126 on PrP mRNA gene expression in Mouse microglia cells BV-2 by real-time quantitative PCR. PrP mRNA expression level was found to be significantly increased after 18 h exposure of BV-2 cells to PrP 106-126, with 3-fold increase after 18 h and 4.5-fold increase after 24 h and BV-2 cells proliferating occurred correspondingly. Our results provide the first in vitro evidence of the increase of PrP mRNA levels in microglial cells exposed to PrP 106-126, and indicate that microglial cells might play a critical role in prion pathogenesis.