Culturing and Biological Cloning of Trypanosoma brucei

Any biochemical analysis is usually made easier by the availability of large numbers of cells to be analyzed, and one of the reasons for the position held by Trypanusoma brucei as the best characterized parasite is the relative ease with which it can be cultured in the laboratory. The ability to culture cloned populations derived from individual trypanosomes before and after an antigenic switch is vital in investigations into the mechanism of antigenic variation. Genomic DNA prepared from such cloned populations used to analyze variant specific glycoprotein (VSG) genes by Southern blotting led to the discovery of the genomic rearrangements involved in antigenic variation (1 –5 ).