Fatty acid oxidation participates of the survival to starvation, cell cycle progression and differentiation in the insect stages of Trypanosoma cruzi

During its complex life cycle, Trypanosoma cruzi colonizes different niches in its insect and mammalian hosts. This characteristic determined the types of parasites that adapted to face challenging environmental cues. The primary environmental challenge, particularly in the insect stages, is poor nutrient availability. These T. cruzi stages could be exposed to fatty acids originating from the degradation of the perimicrovillar membrane. In this study, we revisit the metabolic fate of fatty acid breakdown in T. cruzi. Herein, we show that during parasite proliferation, the glucose concentration in the medium can regulate the fatty acid metabolism. At the stationary phase, the parasites fully oxidize fatty acids. [U-14C]-palmitate can be taken up from the medium, leading to CO2 production via beta-oxidation. Lastly, we also show that fatty acids are degraded through beta-oxidation. Additionally, through beta-oxidation, electrons are fed directly to oxidative phosphorylation, and acetyl-CoA is supplied to the tricarboxylic acid cycle, which can be used to feed other anabolic pathways such as the de novo biosynthesis of fatty acids. Author SummaryTrypanosoma cruzi is a protist parasite with a life cycle involving two types of hosts, a vertebrate one (which includes humans, causing Chagas disease) and an invertebrate one (kissing bugs, which vectorize the infection among mammals). In both hosts, the parasite faces environmental challenges such as sudden changes in the metabolic composition of the medium in which they develop, severe starvation, osmotic stress and redox imbalance, among others. Because kissing bugs feed infrequently in nature, an intriguing aspect of T. cruzi biology (it exclusively inhabits the digestive tube of these insects) is how they subsist during long periods of starvation. In this work, we show that this parasite performs a metabolic switch from glucose consumption to lipid oxidation, and it is able to consume lipids and the lipid-derived fatty acids from both internal origins as well as externally supplied compounds. When fatty acid oxidation is chemically inhibited by etomoxir, a very well-known drug that inhibits the translocation of fatty acids into the mitochondria, the proliferative insect stage of the parasites has dramatically diminished survival under severe metabolic stress and its differentiation into its infective forms is impaired. Our findings place fatty acids in the centre of the scene regarding their extraordinary resistance to nutrient-depleted environments.