ArticleProceedings of the National Academy of Sciences of the United States of America2009
Propulsion of African trypanosomes is driven by bihelical waves with alternating chirality separated by kinks.
Article in Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences of the United States of America, 2009. The graph could read no effect estimate from its abstract, so it casts no vote on the map. Cited by 45 papers.
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Who cites it
45 citing papers in PubMed.
- Temperature dependence of the motility of the parasitic microswimmer Trypanosoma brucei.Biophysical journal · 2026Article
- CryoEM structure of thebioRxiv : the preprint server for biology · 2025Article
- Spinning and corkscrewing of oceanic macroplankton revealed through in situ imaging.Science advances · 2024Article
- Spatial confinement of Trypanosoma brucei in microfluidic traps provides a new tool to study free swimming parasites.PloS one · 2023Article
- Light chain 2 is a Tctex-type related axonemal dynein light chain that regulates directional ciliary motility in Trypanosoma brucei.PLoS pathogens · 2022Article
- Structure of the trypanosome paraflagellar rod and insights into non-planar motility of eukaryotic cells.Cell discovery · 2021Article
- High-speed, three-dimensional imaging reveals chemotactic behaviour specific to human-infectiveeLife · 2021Article
- Article
- If host is refractory, insistent parasite goes berserk: Trypanosomatid Blastocrithidia raabei in the dock bug Coreus marginatus.PloS one · 2020Article
- Article
- Rotation and propulsion in 3D active chiral droplets.Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences of the United States of America · 2019Article
- High-speed multifocal plane fluorescence microscopy for three-dimensional visualisation of beating flagella.Journal of cell science · 2019Article
- Article
- Flagellum couples cell shape to motility inProceedings of the National Academy of Sciences of the United States of America · 2018Article
- Parasite motility is critical for virulence of African trypanosomes.Scientific reports · 2018Article
- Motility-based label-free detection of parasites in bodily fluids using holographic speckle analysis and deep learning.Light, science & applications · 2018Article
- Use of chiral cell shape to ensure highly directional swimming in trypanosomes.PLoS computational biology · 2017Article
- Transient Superdiffusion and Long-Range Correlations in the Motility Patterns of Trypanosomatid Flagellate Protozoa.PloS one · 2016Article
- Bimodal rheotactic behavior reflects flagellar beat asymmetry in human sperm cells.Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences of the United States of America · 2015Article
- Electric-field-induced assembly and propulsion of chiral colloidal clusters.Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences of the United States of America · 2015Article
Corrections and comments
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12 authors.
Funding
Abstract
Trypanosoma brucei, a parasitic protist with a single flagellum, is the causative agent of African sleeping sickness. Propulsion of T. brucei was long believed to be by a drill-like, helical motion. Using millisecond differential interference-contrast microscopy and analyzing image sequences of cultured procyclic-form and bloodstream-form parasites, as well as bloodstream-form cells in infected mouse blood, we find that, instead, motility of T. brucei is by the propagation of kinks, separating left-handed and right-handed helical waves. Kink-driven motility, previously encountered in prokaryotes, permits T. brucei a helical propagation mechanism while avoiding the large viscous drag associated with a net rotation of the broad end of its tapering body. Our study demonstrates that millisecond differential interference-contrast microscopy can be a useful tool for uncovering important short-time features of microorganism locomotion.
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