Introducing a Gene Knockout Directly Into the Amastigote Stage of Trypanosoma cruzi Using the CRISPR/Cas9 System

Trypanosoma cruzi is a pathogenic protozoan parasite that causes Chagas' disease mainly in Latin America. In order to identify a novel drug target against T. cruzi, it is important to validate the essentiality of the target gene in the mammalian stage of the parasite, the amastigote. Amastigotes of T. cruzi replicate inside the host cell; thus, it is difficult to conduct a knockout experiment without going through other developmental stages. Recently, our group reported a growth condition in which the amastigote can replicate axenically for up to 10 days without losing its amastigote-like properties. By using this temporal axenic amastigote culture, we successfully introduced gRNAs directly into the Cas9-expressing amastigote to cause gene knockouts and analyzed their phenotypes exclusively in the amastigote stage. In this report, we describe a detailed protocol to produce in vitro derived extracellular amastigotes, and to utilize the axenic culture in a CRISPR/Cas9-mediated knockout experiment. The growth phenotype of knockout amastigotes can be evaluated either by cell counts of the axenic culture, or by replication of intracellular amastigote after host cell invasion. This method bypasses the parasite stage differentiation normally involved in producing a transgenic or a knockout amastigote. Utilization of the temporal axenic amastigote culture has the potential to expand the experimental freedom of stage-specific studies in T. cruzi.