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2. When a cow is fed with offals derived from a PrP^Sc-infected sheep, prions are somehow taken up from the gut and transported to the brain. The details of this process are not yet known, but one likely scenario is that PrP^Sc enters a nerve ending (synapse) from where it is transported along the nerve fiber (axon), arriving finally at the plasma membrane of the nerve cell body in the brain.

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