chapter 1 Human and animal diseases: clinical symptoms, epidemiology, and neuropathology -- chapter 2 The infectious agent and the prion hypothesis -- chapter 3 The prion protein: structure, conversion, and mechanism of propagation -- chapter 4 Cell biology, genetic and putative function of the normal prion protein -- chapter 5 Prion strains, species barriers, and multiple conformations of the prion protein -- chapter 6 From the mouth to the brain -- chapter 7 Neurodegeneration in prion diseases -- chapter 8 The diagnosis problem and current tests -- chapter 9 Therapeutic approaches -- chapter 10 Cyclic amplification of prion protein misfolding: rationale, applications, and perspectives -- chapter 11 Other diseases of protein misfolding -- chapter 12 Prions: a common phenomenon in biology?.