Journal Article


Disruption of Leishmania flagellum attachment zone architecture causes flagellum loss

Abstract

Leishmania are flagellated eukaryotic parasites that cause leishmaniasis and are closely related to the other kinetoplastid parasites such as Trypanosoma brucei. In all these parasites there is a cell membrane invagination at the base of the flagellum called the flagellar pocket, which is tightly associated with and sculpted by cytoskeletal struc-tures including the flagellum attachment zone (FAZ). The FAZ is a complex intercon-nected structure linking the flagellum to the cell body and has critical roles in cell morphogenesis, function and pathogenicity. However, this structure varies dramati-cally in size and organisation between these different parasites, suggesting changes in protein localisation and function. Here, we screened the localisation and function of the Leishmania orthologues of T. brucei FAZ proteins identified in the genome-wide protein tagging project TrypTag. We identified 27 FAZ proteins and our deletion anal-ysis showed that deletion of two FAZ proteins in the flagellum, FAZ27 and FAZ34 resulted in a reduction in cell body size, and flagellum loss in some cells. Furthermore, after null mutant generation, we observed distinct and reproducible changes to cell shape, demonstrating the ability of the parasite to adapt to morphological perturba-tions resulting from gene deletion. This process of adaptation has important implica-tions for the study of Leishmania mutants.

Attached files

Authors

Halliday, Clare
de Liz, Laryssa Vanessa
Vaughan, Sue
Sunter, Jack D.

Oxford Brookes departments

Department of Biological and Medical Sciences

Dates

Year of publication: 2023
Date of RADAR deposit: 2023-11-20


Creative Commons License This work is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution 4.0 International License


Related resources

This RADAR resource is Identical to Disruption of Leishmania flagellum attachment zone architecture causes flagellum loss

Details

  • Owner: Joseph Ripp
  • Collection: Outputs
  • Version: 1 (show all)
  • Status: Live
  • Views (since Sept 2022): 589