Discovering the mechanism of how trypanosomes epigenetically assemble unconventional kinetochores at centromeres

Sleeping sickness parasites build their cell-division machinery without the protein that every other organism uses to anchor it. This matters because the parasites that cause sleeping sickness, Chagas disease, and leishmaniasis threaten nearly a billion people, yet scientists do not understand how they organise their chromosomes during cell division. In most cells, a specialised protein called CENP-A marks the centromere—the spot where the kinetochore, a protein machine, attaches to pull chromosomes apart. Kinetoplastid parasites lack CENP-A entirely. The researcher’s lab has proposed that the parasite uses a chemical mark—methylation—on a different histone protein to block kinetochore binding everywhere except at centromeres, which remain unmarked. This project aims to identify the enzyme that places that mark. If the research succeeds, it will reveal a fundamentally new way that cells specify centromere identity. Because this mechanism is unique to the parasites and absent in humans, the enzyme could become a target for drugs against neglected tropical diseases. This is primarily fundamental science—understanding an unusual epigenetic system—but past discoveries of parasite-specific cell biology have directly led to treatments.