Overview
- The University of York-led team reported Monday in Nature Microbiology that a protein called ESB2 is an RNA-cutting enzyme that sits in the parasite’s Expression Site Body.
- ESB2 selectively destroys helper gene messages, known as ESAG transcripts, as they are made, which lets the parasite flood its surface with VSG coat proteins while keeping other proteins scarce.
- The work answers a roughly 40-year question about how Trypanosoma brucei produces huge amounts of its protective coat yet only tiny amounts of helper proteins from the same expression site.
- The researchers used TurboID proximity labeling mass spectrometry to map the Expression Site Body network and identified ESAP1 plus two ESB-specific proteins named ESB2 and ESB3.
- The authors say this mechanism reveals a new vulnerability that could guide future treatments for sleeping sickness, a tsetse-borne disease that can invade the brain and cause confusion, severe sleep disruption, and coma if untreated.