The Knowns Unknowns: Exploring the Homologous Recombination Repair Pathway in Toxoplasma gondii

FENOY IM; BOGADO SS; CONTRERAS MS; GOTTIFREDI V*; ANGEL SO*

Frontiers in Microbiology

Frontiers Media S. A.

Año: 2016 vol. 7 p. 1 - 15

Toxoplasma gondiiis an apicomplexan parasite of medical and veterinary importance which causes toxoplasmosisin humans. Great effort is currently being devoted towards the identificationof novel drugs capable of targeting such illness. In this context, we believethat the thorough understanding of the life cycle of this model parasite will facilitatethe identification of new druggable targets in T. gondii. It is important to exploit the available knowledge of pathwayswhich could modulate the sensitivity of the parasite to DNA damaging agents.The homologous recombination repair (HRR) pathway may be of particular interestin this regard as its inactivation sensitizes other cellular models such ashuman cancer to targeted therapy. Herein we discuss the information availableon T. gondii´s HRR pathway from theperspective of its conservation with respect to yeast and humans. Specialattention was devoted to BRCT domain-containing and end-resection associated proteinsin T. gondii as in other experimentalmodels such proteins have crucial roles in early/late steps or HRR and in the pathwaychoice for double strand break resolution.We conclude that T. gondii HRR pathway is a source of several lines of investigationthat allow to  to comprehend the extentof diversification of HRR in T. gondii.Such an effort will serve to determine if HRR could represent a potentialtarger for the treatment of toxoplasmosis.