Role of Proteomics in the Study of Trypanosoma cruzi Biology

Abstract

Proteomics is the science that studies the proteome, which corresponds to the global expression of proteins at a given time under determined conditions. In the last 20 years, proteomics has emerged as a powerful tool that has allowed the study of proteins that are expressed in the cell under normal or altered conditions as well as post-translational modifications, such as phosphorylation, glycosidation, acetylation, and methylation, among others. In this chapter, we present the main contributions of proteomics to the knowledge of Trypanosoma cruzi biology . Proteomes of all T. cruzi life cycle stages, secretomes/exoproteomes, post-translational modifications such as phosphorylation or acetylation and immunomes, interactomes, and glycomes are described. The role of proteomics in the identification of new chemotherapeutic targets and potential vaccine candidates will also be discussed. to the intracellular superoxide and in and them. These observations indicate that protein expression focused on increased motility and control of macrophage-derived free radicals may represent a survival and persistence strategy developed by TcI isolates T. cruzi trypsin and Lys C. The peptides are subjected to a cleaning phase, and the peptides can be labeled using techniques such as ICAT, ITRAQ , and SILAC or not be labeled, using label-free quantification (LFQ ). Finally, the samples are subjected to a ultrahigh-pressure liquid chromatography (UHPLC) associated to mass spectrometry (MS). The information obtained is submitted to bioinformatics analysis using software such as MaxQuant (or others), for quantitative proteomics analysis, and then by Andromeda to obtain the sequence of the peptides in the different databases and Perseus (or others) to obtain classifications, proteomics interactions, post-transductional modifications, and metabolic pathways.