colony tries to merge with a prion-containing colony, the prion causes the "invader" cells to die, ensuring that only related colonies obtain the benefit of sharing resources. Prions of yeast [PSI+] and [URE3] In 1965, Brian Cox, a geneticist working with the yeast Saccharomyces cerevisiae, described a genetic trait (termed [PSI+]) with an unusual pattern of inheritance. The initial discovery of [PSI+] was made in a strain auxotrophic for adenine due to a nonsense mutation. Despite many years of effort, Cox could not identify a conventional mutation that was responsible for the [PSI+] trait. In 1994, yeast geneticist Reed Wickner correctly hypothesized that [PSI+] as well as another mysterious heritable trait, [URE3], resulted from prion forms of the normal cellular proteins, Sup35p and Ure2p, respectively. The names of yeast prions are frequently placed within brackets to indicate that they are non-mendelian in their passage to progeny cells, much like plasmid and mitochondrial DNA. Further investigation found that [PSI+] is the result of a self-propagating misfolded form of Sup35p (a 201 amino acid long protein), which is an important factor for translation termination during protein synthesis. In [PSI+] yeast cells the Sup35 protein forms filamentous aggregates known as amyloid. The amyloid conformation is self-propagating and represents the prion state. Amazingly distinct prion states exist for the Sup35 protein with distinct properties and these distinctions are self-propagating. Other prions also can form distinct different variants (or strains). It is believed that suppression of nonsense mutations in [PSI+] cells is due to a reduced amount of functional Sup35 because much of the protein is in the amyloid state. The Sup35 protein assembles into amyloid via an amino-terminal prion domain. The structure is based on the stacking of the prion domains in an in-register and parallel beta sheet conformation. An important finding by Chernoff, in a collaboration between the Liebman and Lindquist laboratories, was that a protein chaperone was required for [PSI+] to be maintained. Because the only function of chaperones is to help proteins fold properly, this finding strongly supported Wickner's hypothesis that [PSI+] was a heritable protein state (i.e. a prion). Likewise, this finding also provided evidence for the general hypothesis that prions, including the originally proposed mammalian PrP prion, are heritable forms of protein. Because of the action of chaperones, especially Hsp104, proteins that code for [PSI+] and [URE3] can convert from non-prion to prion forms. For this reason, yeast prions