Cryo-electron tomography of intact Trypanosoma brucei flagella reveals novel attachment structures and the orthorhombic crystalline organization of the paraflagellar rod.
Reveals new flagellar structures in T. brucei; hypothesis-generating for motility mechanisms and antiparasitic targets.
Trypanosoma brucei is a uni-cellular protist that causes African sleeping sickness. These parasites have a flagellum that is attached to the cell body and is indispensible for its motility. The flagellum consists of a canonical 9+2 axoneme and a paraflagellar rod (PFR), an intricate tripartite, fibrous structure that is connected to the axoneme. In this paper we describe results from cryo-electron tomography of unperturbed flagella. This method revealed novel structures that are likely involved in attaching the flagellum to the cell. We also show the first cryo-electron tomographic images of a basal body in situ, revealing electron dense structures inside its triplet microtubules. Sub-tomogram averaging of the PFR revealed that its distal region is organized as an orthorhombic crystal.
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Höög et al. (2012) studied this question.
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