标题:Tubulin biosynthesis in the developmental cycle of a parasitic protozoan, Leishmania mexicana: changes during differentiation of motile and nonmotile stages
期刊名称:Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences
印刷版ISSN:0027-8424
电子版ISSN:1091-6490
出版年度:1981
卷号:78
期号:12
页码:7624-7628
DOI:10.1073/pnas.78.12.7624
语种:English
出版社:The National Academy of Sciences of the United States of America
摘要:Cytodifferentiation in the transition cycle of the parasitic protozoan Leishmania mexicana amazonensis was studied in vitro. The flagellated motile promastigotes transform into the nonmotile amastigotes in 7 days at 35 degrees C intracellularly in the murine macrophage line J774G8. In medium 199 plus fetal bovine serum, the reverse transformation occurs extracellularly at 27 degrees C in 2 days. Slab gel electrophoresis of leishmanias labeled with [35S]methionine during transformation revealed changes in protein banding patterns. The intensity of two protein species with apparent molecular weights of approximately equal to 55,000 increased in the amastigote-to-promastigote differentiation and decreased during the reverse transformation. These two protein species comigrated approximately with alpha- and beta-tubulin of Chlamydomonas flagella in two-dimensional gel electrophoresis. The lower band was further identified as beta-tubulin by immunoprecipitation using rabbit antiserum specific to the beta-tubulin of Chlamydomonas axonemes. The biosynthetic change of tubulin was found to correlate with the morphological change of microtubules is leishmanial flagella and cytoskeleton during transformation.