Transcriptomics profiling of the developmental progression of Trypanosoma brucei

Mitochondrial metabolic remodeling is a hallmark of the Trypanosoma brucei digenetic life cycle since the insect stage utilizes the cost-effective oxidative phosphorylation to generate ATP, while bloodstream cells switch to less energetically efficient aerobic glycolysis. Due to difficulties in acquiring enough parasites from the tsetse fly vector for biochemical analysis, the dynamics of the parasite´s mitochondrial metabolic rewiring in the vector have remained obscure. Here, we took advantage of in vitro-induced differentiation to follow changes at the RNA levels. To determine global changes to the transcriptome across the in vitro induced developmental progression of RBP6OE 123 cells, we applied RNA-seq measurements and analyses