What is it about?
Giardia is a common parasite found in freshwater worldwide and causes a form of severe and infectious diarrhea in humans. It had been difficult to study how this parasite regulates its growth and division due to limitations of prior techniques. This study describes a method to study this important process and presents some preliminary results that are surprising.
Featured Image
Why is it important?
The growth and division of this parasite is responsible for the clinical symptoms for Giardia infections. This pathway is also linked to the development of the parasite into its infectious form. The ability to study the cell cycle of Giardia would advance studies of the development of drugs to block this pathway which could result in limiting the pathology and transmission of the disease caused by Giardia.
Perspectives
The results described in this publication is a result of the collaboration among myself and my graduate and undergraduate students. Parts of this work was very technically challenging so we are very happy to obtain a set of conditions that could be used to study such an important process in this parasite. We hope this method would help other researchers to study the Giardia cell cycle.
Janet Yee
Trent University
Read the Original
This page is a summary of: Drug-Free Approach To Study the Unusual Cell Cycle of Giardia intestinalis, mSphere, September 2017, ASM Journals,
DOI: 10.1128/msphere.00384-16.
You can read the full text:
Contributors
The following have contributed to this page
