Secrets of Secretion

Like an unwanted visitor that plonks themselves down on your sofa and starts emptying the contents of their bag everywhere, Toxoplasma gondii- the single-celled parasite that causes toxoplasmosis – invades cells and secretes many damaging proteins. To explore how these proteins help the parasite (yellow in the pictured sample of mouse immune cells, pink) cause harm, researchers silenced various genes and observed the impact. When the production of one of these secreted proteins, ROP1, was blocked, the host immune system was able to clear the infection that would’ve been lethal if left unchecked. That suggests that ROP1 helps the parasite evade the immune system, and, importantly, this finding appears to apply to both mouse and human infections. The team also identified a host protein that ROP1 interacts with, pointing the way for future studies to unpick the mechanisms of infection and investigate ways to counter it.

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 Simon Butterworth and colleagues
• Signalling In Apicomplexan Parasites Laboratory, The Francis Crick Institute, London, UK
• Image originally published with a Creative Commons Attribution 4.0 International (CC BY 4.0)
• Published in PLOS Pathogens, December 2022