Theoretical and Natural Science
- The Open Access Proceedings Series for Conferences
Theoretical and Natural Science
Vol. 3, 28 April 2023
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Analyzing Flagellum Structure of Trypanosoma Brucei Using Electron Tomography Datasets from Electron Microscopy Data Bank
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Abstract
African trypanosomiasis is a vector-borne parasitic disease. The main parasite that causes the disease is Trypanosoma brucei, also known as T. brucei, which infects its hosts through the tsetse fly. Trypanosoma brucei has an important structure, the flagella. The parasite relies on the flagella for survival and movement, so studying the flagella structure in detail is essential to understanding its function. Therefore, we use electron microscopes for multi-angle observation and photography. We identified some important structures of flagella which aligned with previous literature including the 92+2 axoneme, and the paraflagellar rod (PFR), and we even captured some novel features including densities connecting the axoneme and PFR, densities that interconnect the microtubule, and densities that bridges the different zones of PFR. We also did literature reviews and proposed hypotheses about the functions of these structures. Our structural study could shed light on the inhibition of the flagella movement, thereby treating trypanosomiasis.
Keywords
African trypanosomiasis, flagella, Trypanosoma brucei
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Data Availability
The datasets used and/or analyzed during the current study will be available from the authors upon reasonable request.
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- Volume Title
- Proceedings of the 2nd International Conference on Biological Engineering and Medical Science (ICBioMed 2022), Part I
- ISBN (Print)
- 978-1-915371-25-6
- ISBN (Online)
- 978-1-915371-26-3
- Published Date
- 28 April 2023
- Series
- Theoretical and Natural Science
- ISSN (Print)
- 2753-8818
- ISSN (Online)
- 2753-8826
- DOI
- 10.54254/2753-8818/3/20220191
- Copyright
- 28 April 2023
- Open Access
- This article is an open access article distributed under the terms and conditions of the Creative Commons Attribution (CC BY) license, which permits unrestricted use, distribution, and reproduction in any medium, provided the original work is properly cited