Trypanosomes News and Research

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Microbiologists reveal how T. brucei’s key proteins organize to replicate its mtDNA

A group of diseases that kill millions of people each year can't be touched by antibiotics, and some treatment is so harsh the patient can't survive it. They're caused by parasites, and for decades researchers have searched for a "magic bullet" to kill them without harming the patient. Now, a team of microbiologists at the University of Massachusetts Amherst has made an advance that could one day lead to a new weapon for fighting parasitic diseases such as African sleeping sickness, chagas disease and leishmaniasis.

11 Jul 2012

Mimotopes can help develop new diagnostic tests for sleeping sickness

Each year many thousands of Africans contract sleeping sickness. The cause is a unicellular parasite, a trypanosome, which is transmitted by the bite of tsetse flies. First the parasite multiplies in blood and lymph, while evading the human immune system. It then lodges in organs like heart and kidneys and finally in the brain. Patients become disoriented, their sleeping pattern disintegrates and they get motor and mental problems.

23 May 2012

Scientists discover linchpin protein that drives mitochondria's calcium machinery

Mitochondria, those battery-pack organelles that fuel the energy of almost every living cell, have an insatiable appetite for calcium. Whether in a dish or a living organism, the mitochondria of most organisms eagerly absorb this chemical compound.

20 Jun 2011

Tsetse fly mapping distribution model may help solve sleeping sickness mystery

Since before the 1300s, people living in many parts of Africa have been dying from a disease known as sleeping sickness. Despite public health campaigns that explain ways to stop infection—primarily by killing the disease-spreading tsetse fly—successful eradication has remained out of reach. That's partly because epidemiologists can't predict where cases will emerge next.

28 Apr 2011

New approaches for controlling sleeping sickness caused by trypanosomes

The research could eventually lead to new approaches for controlling sleeping sickness in humans and wasting diseases in livestock which are caused by trypanosomes carried by the bloodsucking tsetse fly.

18 Feb 2011

African sleeping sickness parasite's previously unrecognized extreme social behavior discovered

Long considered a freewheeling loner, the Trypanosoma brucei parasite responsible for African sleeping sickness has revealed a totally unexpected social side, opening a potential chink in the behavioral armor of this and other supposedly solitary human parasites, according to research presented at the American Society for Cell Biology's 50th Annual Meeting in Philadelphia.

15 Dec 2010

Research on trypanosomes can open way for African sleeping sickness drug development

Trypanosomes are parasites responsible for many human and animal diseases, primarily in tropical climates. One disease these parasites cause, African sleeping sickness, results from the bite of infected tsetse flies, putting over 60 million Africans at risk in 36 sub-Saharan countries. The recent 1998-2001 sleeping sickness epidemics in South Sudan, Angola, Democratic Republic of Congo and Uganda killed tens of thousands of people and resulted in over a half million infected individuals.

31 Aug 2010

Researchers discover genetic explanation for non-diabetic kidney disease in African-Americans

Kidney disease is a growing public health problem, with approximately half a million individuals in the United States requiring dialysis treatments to replace the function of their failed kidneys. The problem is particularly acute among African-Americans, whose rates of kidney disease are four times higher than those of European Americans.

20 Jul 2010

New technique captures bacterial infection on film

Researchers have developed a new technique that allows them to make a movie of bacteria infecting their living host.

27 Jul 2009

Research suggests core nuclear pore elements shared by all eukaryotes

For perhaps 1.8 billion years after life first emerged on Earth, a sort of evolutionary writer's block stalled the development of organisms more complicated than single cells. Then, a burst of experimental creativity about 1.7 billion years ago brought the cell nucleus onto the scene, stashing the cell's genetic material inside a protective inner membrane and setting the stage for the evolution of more sophisticated creatures from yeast, say, to plants and human beings.

12 Jul 2009

Scientists develop tool to study a deadly parasite’s histone code

In the Japanese art of paper folding, a series of folds can make the same sheet of paper into a ballerina or baby elephant. But try unfolding the baby elephant and making it into a ballerina. It's like trying to make a neuron from a kidney cell. Epigenetics, it turns out, isn't much different from this old Japanese art: Each fold, or epigenetic crease, both limits and permits further potential folds in a way that mirrors how epigenetic changes seal a cell's fate.

13 May 2009

African sleeping sickness parasite breaks its own DNA to avoid detection

The parasite Trypanosoma brucei, which causes African sleeping sickness, is like a thief donning a disguise.

15 Apr 2009

Scans show immune cells intercepting parasites

Researchers may have identified one of the body's earliest responses to a group of parasites that causes illness in developing nations.

10 Dec 2008

Newly identified protein called BILBO1 fatal to Trypanosoma brucei

Trypanosoma brucei is a pathogen that causes epidemics of human and animal sleeping sickness in central and Southern Africa, a disease that is fatal if untreated. A new paper published this week in the open-access journal PLoS Biology investigates the formation of a trypanosome structure called the Flagellar Pocket (FP).

6 May 2008

When tsetse flies fall for a host, they keep coming back for more

If you like a restaurant first time around, you're likely to go back, aren't you? Well the same goes, more or less, for tsetse flies, as researchers from CIRAD, CIRDES and the University of Neuchâtel have recently demonstrated.

9 Jan 2008

Enzyme synergy shown to perpetuate sleeping sickness

The pathogenesis of the parasite African trypanosome (T. brucei) has been linked to a key protein switch, detailed in a new study by researchers at the University of Iowa and the Veterans Affairs Medical Center of Iowa City, led by Dr. John Donelson.

19 Oct 2007

Cure for African sleeping sickness

Studies of the enzyme CTP synthetase in the parasite Trypanosoma brucei have brought researchers at Umeå University in Sweden closer to a cure for African sleeping sickness.

26 Apr 2007

Genomic expansion and diversification in a African sleeping sickness parasite allow it to evade host detection

A team of scientists headed by Dr. Sara Melville at the University of Cambridge has shown that the parasite known to cause African sleeping sickness has evolved an unusual chromosomal structure as a result of environmental adaptation.

3 Aug 2006

African sleeping sickness

Each year, over 300,000 people die of African sleeping sickness (trypanosomiasis). Researchers from the Flanders Interuniversity Institute for Biotechnology (VIB) connected to the Free University of Brussels are making strides in the battle against this disease.

10 Apr 2006

Sleeping sickness parasite shows how cells divide their insides

Researchers at Yale have brought to light a mechanism that regulates the way an internal organelle, the Golgi apparatus, duplicates as cells prepare to divide, according to a report in Science Express.

7 Nov 2005