Trypanosoma cruzi Trypanosoma cruzi is the causal agent of Chagas’ disease (American Trypanosomiasis) which infects nearly five million people in the Americas with another 70 million at risk of infection. It is one of the most severe parasitic disease currently plaguing the Americas. Infection by T. cruzi is lifelong and chronic infection results in, among other things, severe cardiomyopathy in a third of infected individuals. T. cruzi remains grossly underreported, understudied and underfunded and this has resulted in a lack of fundamental tools to even accurately diagnose and treat this disease. Basic research on T. cruzi pathogenesis, up to now, has focused almost exclusively on the host immune response to infection due to a lack of efficient genetic tools to interrogate this parasite. Fortunately for us, advances brought about by CRISPR/Cas9 genome editing technology have opened the door to performing detailed molecular studies of how T. cruzi effectively manipulates its host cell for the first time. We are implementing a variety of innovative techniques to identify, tag and knockout proteins secreted from this pathogen into the host cell that actively modify host cell processes to its advantage.
