Isolation of Toxoplasma gondii in cell culture: an alternative to bioassay

Int J Parasitol. 2023 Dec 12:S0020-7519(23)00228-X. doi: 10.1016/j.ijpara.2023.12.002. Online ahead of print.ABSTRACTToxoplasma gondii is an apicomplexan protozoan parasite that can infect mammals and birds. The infection can cause acute toxoplasmosis and death in susceptible hosts. Bioassay using cats and mice has been the standard for the isolation of T. gondi from infected hosts for the past several decades. However, bioassay is labor-intensive, expensive, and involves using laboratory animals. To search alternative approaches and to work towards replacement of animal experiments, we summarized the key literature and conducted four experiments to isolate T. gondii in vitro by cell culture. A few heart tissue samples from animals with the highest antibody titers in a given collection were used for T. gondii isolation. These experiments included samples from five out of 51 wild ducks, four of 46 wild turkeys, six of 24 white-tailed deer, as well as from six kangaroos that had died with acute toxoplasmosis in a zoo. These experiments resulted in three isolates from five chronically infected wild ducks (60%), four isolates from four chronically infected wild turkeys (100%), one isolate from six chronically infected white-tailed deer (17%), and four isolates from six kangaroos with acute toxoplasmosis (67%). In addition, five isolates from the five chronically infected wild ducks were obtained by bioassay in mice, showing a 100% success rate, which is higher than the 60% rate b...
Source: International Journal for Parasitology - Category: Parasitology Authors: Source Type: research