PRNP and prion disease: Shortly after the accomplishment of prion disease transmission with recPrP amyloids, Baskakov and associates made an unexpected discovery: while wt Syrian hamsters (Sha) inoculated with recombinant ShaPrP amyloid did not develop any clinical signs of prion disease, some of them accumulated abnormally folded forms of PrP, and inoculation of their brain homogenates to wt animals in a second passage induced a full-fledged prion disease (Makarava et al., 2010).