Further development of a method to isolate intracellular stages of Trypanosoma cruz; from infected rats

Abstract

Investigations of amino acid utilization during growth of T. brucei S42 in defined media have revealed the existence of a hitherto unreported and potentially important pathway for carbon assimilation. Large amounts of threonine were metabolized with concomitant excretion of approximately equimolar amounts of glycine. The amount of threonine metabolized was typically 20-fold greater than the amount of proline metabolized, and 4-fold greater than the dry weight of cellular material synthesized during the same period. Use of radioactively-labelled threonine confirmed the origin of the excreted glycine, and it was further demonstrated that the remaining half of the molecule was converted to acetate.