In doing this, we find that wild-type and D178N mutant PrPC, (a PrPC mutant associated with both Fatal Familial Insomnia and Creutzfeldt-Jakob disease), exhibit easily distinguishable current signatures and kinetics inside the pore and we further demonstrate, with the use of Hidden Markov Model signal processing, accurate discrimination between these two proteins at the single molecule level based on the kinetics of a single PrPC capture event. This evidence concerns the gene PRNP and fatal familial insomnia.