Toxoplasma's balancing act explained
Thursday, November 24, 2016 - 11:01
in Biology & Nature
The parasite Toxoplasma gondii is a silent success. It infects up to 95% of people in many regions of the world, and most of them never know it, due to the parasite's artful manipulation of its host's immune response. Toxoplasma keeps the immune response low enough so that it can thrive, but high enough so that its human hosts generally live healthy lives and can incubate parasites. Scientists at EMBL and the Institute for Advanced Biosciences (IAB, an INSERM - CNRS - Université Grenoble-Alpes research centre) have uncovered one of the ways it maintains this balance, in a paper published today in Structure.