Luminescent Discrimination of Prions

A recent paper in Nature Methods describes a technique for using luminescent conjugated polymers (LCPs) for characterizing prion strains. The LCPs emit conformation-dependent fluorescence spectra when applied to brain sections containing aggregated prions. Using the technique, the authors were able to discriminate between four immunohistochemically indistinguishable prion strains from sheep scrapie, chronic wasting disease (CWD), bovine spongiform encephalopathy (BSE), and mouse-adapted Rocky Mountain Laboratory scrapie prions.

I thought it was interesting that you can obtain conformation-dependent fluorescence spectra.