Breaking the Cycle

As research delves deeper it tends to reveal ever-more complex details of the processes underpinning life and disease. So it’s a welcome change for a study into cryptosporidium (red in the mouse intestine pictured), a parasite that commonly causes diarrhoea in children, to discover that its life cycle is actually more simple than conventionally believed. The researchers observed the parasite as it reproduced in sample cells and found it followed a rigid routine of three asexual replications before switching to male and female forms for sexual reproduction and further spreading. This contradicts the previous impression that there was a specialised intermediate stage between the asexual and sexual forms. Unlike mosquito-borne parasites, cryptosporidium just relies on one host, so is a simpler model to examine parasite progression, meaning that this revelation could point towards both new tactics to tackle diarrhoea, and potentially provide insights into other conditions like malaria.

Written by Anthony Lewis

Anthony Lewis

Writer

Ant was the web editor in the early days of BPoD, and has since worked with the UK’s top science organisations as a writer and multimedia producer. He now splits his time between freelance work and managing multimedia at The Lancet.

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• Image from work by Elizabeth D. English and colleagues
• Department of Pathobiology, School of Veterinary Medicine, University of Pennsylvania, Philadelphia, PA, USA
• Image copyright held by the original authors
• Research published in PLOS Biology, April 2022