Parasitology

Parasites are responsible for a number of human diseases that cause significant morbidity and mortality, including malaria, African sleeping sickness, leishmaniasis and Lyme disease. Understanding how parasites infect the body and evade clearance by the host immune response is of key importance to developing effective therapeutics to treat them. Using the image-based approach provided by the ImageStream, it is possible to not only detect the population of infected cells but also determine the number of parasites residing within cells, as well as their impact on sub-cellular signaling events.

Trypanosomes

Trypanosoma brucei is a parasite which causes African sleeping sickness. Shown in the figure is a study in which nuclear localization of a GFP tagged molecule was quantitated in two samples. The histogram shows the Similarity score for a cross correlation between the GFP image and the DRAQ5 nuclear image for each cell. A high Similarity score indicates that the GFP image and the DRAQ5 image are highly similar (GFP has translocated to the nucleus). A low Similarity score is obtained for untranslocated events. See the application note for more details.

Babesia spot count within RBC

Babesiosis is a malaria-like disease caused by infection of red blood cells by the parasite Babesia. While healthy individuals may be asymptomatic, infection can be fatal in immune-compromised people. Using the ImageStream, Babesia were identified within infected RBC by staining parasite DNA with YOYO1. The stage of infection can be inferred by counting the number of infected cells and the number of parasites in each RBC.