Discussion

Trypanosoma brucei is an extracellular flagellated parasite responsible for sleeping sickness in humans and nagana in cattle in Africa and it is exclusively transmitted by the bite of tsetse flies. Its complex development involves several strictly organized differentiation and migration steps in distinct organs. But how do they sense the different environments they encounter throughout their life cycle? How do they respond and thus initiate next differentiation steps? FLAM8 (FLAgellum Membrane protein 8), a flagellar protein with putative sensory functions will be studied both in vitro and in vivo within the insect vector and the mammalian host, by using bioluminescent knock-out parasites (Subota et al., 2014). This candidate protein might act as a receptor of external ligands or an effector to activate downstream responses. As parasite differentiation is a prerequisite to the success of vector infection, vector-host transmission and propagation in the host, their sensing capacities appear as vital for T. brucei virulence and pathogenesis.