Molecular diagnosis of experimental Chagas disease

Diagnostic methods for detecting Trypanosoma cruzi infection are important to allow administration of chemotherapy and as an experimental tool when trying to understand the pathogenesis of Chagas disease. A nested polymerase chain reaction (PCR)-based approach was recently used to demonstrate preferential heart and skeletal muscle tropism in mice of a Mexican T. cruzi isolate. The authors of this study also demonstrated higher sensitivity for this PCR setup compared with a commercially available enzyme-linked immunosorbent assay kit.