The ancient question of trypanosome sexuality has recently been reactivated in view of important observations in the African species Trypanosoma brucie, in which Mendelian sexuality has been proposed as a working hypothesis on the basis o f indirect isozyme evidence. Subsequent experiments have confirmed that recombination can occur in T. brucei under defined experimental conditions and suggest...

Previous work has shown that the kinetoplast minicircle DNA of Leishmania species exhibits species-specific sequence divergence and this observation has led to the development of a DNA probe-based diagnostic test for leishmaniasis. In the work reported here, we demonstrate that the minicircle is composed of three types of DNA sequences with differing specificities reflecting different rates of ...

The mitochondrial DNA of trypanosomes contains two types of circular DNAs, minicircles and maxicircles. Both minicircles and maxicircles replicate from specific replication origins by unidirectional theta-type intermediates. Initiation of the minicircle leading strand and also that of at least the first Okazaki fragment involve RNA priming. The Trypanosoma brucei genome encodes two mitochondria...

Kinetoplast DNA (kDNA), the mitochondrial DNA of the trypanosomatid Crithidia fasciculata, is a unique structure containing 5,000 DNA minicircles topologically linked into a massive network. In vivo, the network is condensed into a disk-shaped structure. Replication of minicircles initiates at unique origins that are bound by universal minicircle sequence (UMS)-binding protein (UMSBP), a sequen...

OBJECTIVE To compare the diagnostic performance of seven methods to determine Trypanosoma cruzi infection in patients with chronic Chagas disease. METHODS Analytical study, using the case-control design, which included 205 people (patients with Chagasic cardiomyopathy, n=100; control group, n=105). Three enzyme linked immunosorbent assays, one indirect hemagglutination assay and one immunochr...

Colombian strain of Trypanosoma cruzi, biodeme Type III (T. cruzi I), has been cloned by micromanipulation at two phases of the acute infection: early (10 days ) and advanced (30 days). Twelve clones were obtained therefrom. Characterization by their biological and biochemical behavior showed an identity among the several clones and their parental strain, albeit with different degrees of virule...