Research Article

Copyright © 2014 Jaeson Santos Calla-Choque et al. This is an open access article distributed under the Creative Commons Attribution License, which permits unrestricted use, distribution, and reproduction in any medium, provided the original work is properly cited. Trichomonas vaginalis is a sexually transmitted flagellated protist parasite responsible for trichomoniasis.This parasite is dependent on high levels of iron, favoring its growth and multiplication. Iron also differentially regulates some trichomonad virulence properties by unknown mechanisms. However, there is evidence to support the existence of gene regulatory mechanisms at the transcriptional and posttranscriptional levels that aremediated by iron concentration inT. vaginalis.Thus, the goal of this study was to identify an RNA-binding protein in T. vaginalis that interacts with the tvcp4 RNA stem-loop structure, which may participate in a posttranscriptional iron regulatory mechanism mediated by RNA-protein interactions. We performed RNA electrophoretic mobility shift assay (REMSA) and supershift, UV cross-linking, Northwestern blot, andwestern blot (WB) assays using cytoplasmic protein extracts from T. vaginalis with the tvcp4 RNA hairpin structure as a probe. We identified a 135-kDa protein isolated by the UV cross-linking assays a