Lysosomes for lunch

If an intracellular parasite is too successful at hiding itself, it can end up starving. Toxoplasma gondii gets around this potential problem by munching nutrient-filled host lysosomes, say Isabelle Coppens (Johns Hopkins University, Baltimore, MD), Keith Joiner (University of Arizona, Tucson, AZ), and colleagues.

T. gondii has an extraordinary mechanism for creating a parasitophorous vacuole (PV) around itself—it motors into a host mammalian cell and uses a ring-shaped moving junction to exclude almost all host-derived proteins from the nascent PV membrane. But this leaves the parasite responsible for importing all nutrients including, as Coppens and Joiner found previously, cholesterol.

The group therefore looked at whether endocytosed cholesterol found its way to the PV. They found that it did, and that a wholesale rearrangement of the cytoskeleton was involved. Host microtubule-organizing centers (MTOCs) detached from...