Reader Comments

Post a new comment on this article

"Toxoplasma" anthropized strains and mouse virulence factors

Posted by jegomezmarin on 20 Sep 2014 at 16:21 GMT

This very nice paper by Khan et al. describes the striking predominance of anthropized strains harboring monomorphic Ch1a sequences in French Guaina. One of their conclusions is that previously described mouse virulent trait at ROP18 was not asociated with virulence in mouse and that anthropized strains contained a type III allele, However is not clear if they analyzed the presence of insertion sequence in the upstream region that is responsible for the low expression of the ROP18 protein or definition of alleles was based on sequence of the polymorphic region of the gen. We previously described that absence of insertion sequence was related to more inflammation in ocular toxoplasmosis (1). It would be of interest to know if this insertion sequence is present or not in French Guaina strains.

References
1. Sánchez V, de-la-Torre A, Gómez-Marín JE. Characterization of ROP18 alleles in human toxoplasmosis. Parasitol Int. 2014 Apr;63(2):463-9. doi: 10.1016/j.parint.2013.10.012.

No competing interests declared.