1. Patterns of replication within tissue cysts.
Patterns of replication within tissue cysts. (A) The predominant pattern for parasite replication within in vivo tissue cysts was found to be asynchronous. This included isolated growth where individual parasites were actively replicating (top panel) or the more frequent clustered growth (middle and bottom panels) where multiple parasites adjacent to each other were replicating as a group (yellow dotted outline), while other areas within the tissue cyst contained parasites that were not replicating at the time of harvest (red dotted outline). The density of parasite nuclei in areas with active replication was typically higher than those in areas where active replication was not observed (middle and bottom panels; DNA panels). Asynchronous replication was observed well into the chronic phase seen in a week 8 tissue cyst (bottom panel). (B) Moderately (top panel) and highly synchronized (middle and bottom panels) replication where a significant majority or all parasites appeared to be replicating at the same time were detected both early (week 3 [top and middle panels]) and later (bottom panel) time points. Additional examples as well as rare ordered patterns of replication are presented in Fig. S4 in the supplemental material.
Elizabeth Watts et al. mBio 2015; doi: /mBio