Protists and disease Flashcards
Protists are
All eukaryotic organisms that are neither animals, nor plants, nor fungi
What are the challenges of living within blood?
- Innate immune response
- Adaptive immune response
- Low Iron conc
- How to infect next host
All trypanosomes have a stage in
Vertebrate blood
Structure of a typanosome (kinetoplastid)
Kinetoplast (like a mitochondrion)
Nucleus
Flagellum
Trypanosomes can infect
A wide variety of vertebrates
Wide variety of vectors
Vectors transmit
The parasites to the hosts
T. Brucei causes
African Sleeping Sickness
Human Trypanosomiasis
T. brucei is transmitted by the
Tstetse fly
T. brucei does not have
A free living stage
T. brucei hosts include
Livestock animals as well as humans
T. brucei life cycle
- Tsetse fly bites and takes up trypanosome
- Trypanosome multiplies in midgut and moves to salivary duct
- Tsetse fly transmits trypanosome during feeding through saliva
T. brucei disease progression stage 1
- Chancre (skin lesion forms) - parasite enters the blood
2. Intermittent fever and headache as trypanosome multiplies
T. brucei disease progression stage 2
- Moves to the CNS
- Produce toxins that disturb sleep and behaviour
- Seizures-coma-death
T. brucei disease stages
Chancre - Fever/Headache - CNS/Sleeping/seizures/coma/death
T. brucei evades the immune system by
Antigenic variation (variant surface glycoprotein VSGs)
VSGs
Variant surface glycoproteins (on outer cell wall)
trypanosome changes expression of these genes and evades detection
Waves of fever and headache are due to
Antibody responses to the changing VSG coats
There are over 1000 VSG genes but
Only one is expressed at any one time
There are 20 VSG expression sites on telomeres (the ends of chromosomes) but
Only one is expressed at any one time
VSG gene switching is
Spontaneous
Occurs every 100 cell doublings
VSG gene switching involves
DNA arrangements or transcriptional regulation
T. cruzi causes
Chagas disease