Content area
Full text
About the Authors:
Isabelle Coppens
* E-mail: [email protected] (IC); [email protected] (JDR)
Affiliation: Department of Molecular Microbiology and Immunology, Johns Hopkins University Bloomberg School of Public Health, Baltimore, Maryland, United States of America
ORCID http://orcid.org/0000-0001-5549-2362
Julia D. Romano
* E-mail: [email protected] (IC); [email protected] (JDR)
Affiliation: Department of Molecular Microbiology and Immunology, Johns Hopkins University Bloomberg School of Public Health, Baltimore, Maryland, United States of America
ORCID http://orcid.org/0000-0001-8956-7377Citation: Coppens I, Romano JD (2018) Hostile intruder: Toxoplasma holds host organelles captive. PLoS Pathog 14(3): e1006893. https://doi.org/10.1371/journal.ppat.1006893
Editor: Laurie Read, Buffalo, UNITED STATES
Published: March 29, 2018
Copyright: © 2018 Coppens, Romano. This is an open access article distributed under the terms of the Creative Commons Attribution License, which permits unrestricted use, distribution, and reproduction in any medium, provided the original author and source are credited.
Funding: The Coppens lab is supported by R01AI060767 from NIAID. The funders had no role in study design, data collection and analysis, decision to publish, or preparation of the manuscript.
Competing interests: The authors have declared that no competing interests exist.
The secret weapons of Toxoplasma: Seclusion, secretion, and scavenging
Toxoplasma gondii, a human pathogen of the Apicomplexa phylum, is an obligate intracellular parasite, i.e., a microbe that must reside within a foreign cell to survive and propagate. To achieve intracellular replication, Toxoplasma has mastered three strategies: seclusion, secretion, and scavenging. Upon invasion, the parasite secludes itself from the host cytoplasm by forming the parasitophorous vacuole (PV), a self-made niche that protects it from host cell assaults. Within its PV, Toxoplasma secretes many proteins that transform the PV into a replication-competent milieu, and it subverts many host cell pathways by exporting proteins into the host territory. The parasite relentlessly scavenges nutrients from the host mammalian cytosol and organelles until egress. Hereafter, we focus on the unique properties of the T. gondii PV in relation to the scavenging of host cell-derived nutrients by the parasite.
What are the key features of the PV?
A remarkable hallmark of the PV is the presence of membranous tubules and filamentous structures in the PV lumen. Within 10-20 min post-invasion of a mammalian cell, Toxoplasma expels into the PV lumen an entangled network of membranous tubules 40-60 nm in diameter [1] (Fig 1A); in more recent publications, the...