Surprise Filling

Deep inside a rat’s muscle cell lurks this nasty surprise. Coiled up in a neat spiral, it’s a parasitic worm known as Trichinella spiralis, which causes a disease called trichinosis. The worms have a complex lifecycle, passing between pigs and any animals (or humans) that eat them. When a pig is infected – usually by meat from another infected animal – the parasites burrow their way from the gut into the muscle tissue. Once there, it curls up into a tiny ball and lays low until it is eaten, passing the infection on into a new host. Intriguingly, chemicals produced by the worms can change the shape and structure of adult muscle cells, stabilising the proteins inside them and stopping them from being broken down. Scientists are now hunting for the parasite-produced molecules responsible for these remarkable effects, which could form the basis of future treatments for people with muscle wasting diseases.

Written by Kat Arney

Kat Arney

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Dr Kat Arney is an award-winning science writer, broadcaster and public speaker, and is the founder and Creative Director of First Create The Media.

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• Image from work by Rhiannon R. White and colleagues
• Department of Life Sciences, Imperial College London, London, UK
• Image originally published under a Creative Commons Licence (BY 4.0)
• Research published in PLOS Pathogens, November 2016