FIGURE 7:

Tubulin is lost from the conoid in TgDCX-knockout parasites. SIM images of parental wild-type (top) and TgDCX-null (bottom) parasites expressing mNeonGreenFP-β1-tubulin. Left, Z-projections of the entire 3D stacks of images. Middle, subregions from single slices that happened to pass through the middle of a conoid region were cut out and superimposed on the Z-projection of the entire stack. Right, 4× magnified views of the conoid regions of three wild-type (top) and two knockout (bottom) parasites from those single slices. In these single optical slices through the middle of a conoid, the walls appear as two short bars of brighter fluorescence extending down from the arch of the cortical microtubules. In the knockout parasites, the bars are much less prominent or absent. The red arrowheads point at the walls of the conoid in one of the wild-type parasites (1) and toward the same location in one of the knockout parasites (a). Scale bars, 5 μm (left and middle), 1 μm (right).