Researchers solve 40-year-old mystery behind Sleeping Sickness
A parasite that lives in human blood has been pulling off a strange trick for decades. It covers itself in a dense coat of proteins so the immune system struggles to recognize it, yet it somehow avoids overproducing other nearby proteins made from the same stretch of genetic material. For about 40 years, that imbalance has puzzled scientists. Now a team at the University of York says it has found the mechanism behind it. Writing in Nature Microbiology, the researchers identified a protein called ESB2 that helps the African trypanosome fine-tune the genetic instructions used to survive in the bloodstream. Rather than simply controlling which messages get made, the parasite appears to destroy some of them almost as soon as they appear. That matters because the parasite, Trypanosoma brucei, causes sleeping sickness, a disease spread by tsetse flies in sub-Saharan Africa. Left untreated, the infection can move into the central nervous system and cause confusion, severe sleep disruption, and coma. Dr. Joana Faria, senior author of the study and leader of the research group at …
