Quantitative Plate Detection of Intracranial GFP expressing Toxoplasma gondii

Toxoplasma gondii is an intracellular parasite that affects nearly 60 million individuals in the United States. T. gondii can cause severe complications in immunocompromised individuals and developing fetuses of first time infected mothers. Latent infection of T. gondii causes cysts to form in deep muscle, cardiac, and brain tissue. The aim of this research was to find a functional and robust way to quantify the amount of cysts present in the brains of infected mice. The current method of quantifying T. gondii cyst burden is expensive and time consuming. With this research green fluorescent protein (GFP) was utilized to illuminate the cysts. A fluorescent plate reader was then used to quantify the amount of fluorescent cysts in a given sample of brain tissue