Authors
A Acosta-Serrano1; 1 Liverpool School of Tropical Medicine, UK Discussion
Trypanosomes are kinetoplastid parasites responsible for human sleeping sickness and animal trypanosomiasis in sub-Saharan Africa. While it is predicted that sleeping sickness will soon be eliminated, animal trypanosomiasis will continue to affect economic growth and development in affected regions. African trypanosomes are primarily transmitted through the bite of an infected tsetse. Once ingested into the tsetse midgut, the parasites undergo a complex developmental cycle that allows them to adapt, migrate and colonize different tsetse organs until they become mammalian infectious again. For more than a decade, our lab has studied the molecular interactions between tsetse and African trypanosomes by using a combination of molecular genetics, biochemistry and microscopy. We have sought to understand the route used by trypanosomes to colonize the tsetse midgut and to identify and characterise parasite and fly genes involved in survival and migration through the tsetse. In this lecture, I will describe a novel family of kinetoplastid-specific RNA-binding proteins that contain a Zn-finger MYND domain. In Trypanosoma brucei, these proteins appear essential for the cyclical transmission of trypanosomes through the fly. The second part of my lecture will describe how interrupting the tyrosine metabolism pathway is lethal to blood feeding insects, which is a discovery we are currently developing as a new control tool for vector-borne diseases. 
