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Updated: May 29, 2026

Sexual Transmission of American Trypanosomes from Males and Females to Naive Mates
Published on: January 27, 2019
Characterization of Trypanosoma cruzi telomerase
Riward Campelo1, Maria Mercedes Galindo, Jose Luis Ramirez
1Instituto de Estudios Avanzados, MppCiencia, Tecnología e Industrias Ligeras, Caracas, Venezuela.
Abstract:
High telomerase activity is always associated with actively dividing cells, however the detection of this activity in dividing Leishmania and Trypanosoma cruzi cells has always been disappointingly low. Recently, we have found that Leishmania major telomerase activity can be activated by heat, which combined with dilutions of the nuclear extracts produced an increase in activity comparable to cancer cells. Here we examined whether T. cruzi telomerase shares the same physicochemical properties of primer specificity and overall features of the L. major. Our studies revealed that no telomerase inhibitory factors were present in the nuclear lysates of T. cruzi however the enzyme was activated by heat and was very resilient to heat denaturation. We also showed the extension primer specificity, susceptibility to RNase-A and RNase-H digestion, and the effect of telomerase inhibitors.
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