Laboratory of Immunology, National Institute of Allergy and Infectious Diseases, National Institutes of Health, Building 10, Room 11N315, Bethesda, MD 20892, USA. jandersson@niaid.nih.gov
Diagnostic methods for detecting Trypanosoma cruzi infection are important to allow administration of chemotherapy and as an experimental tool when trying to understand the pathogenesis of Chagas disease. A nested polymerase chain reaction (PCR)-based approach was recently used to demonstrate preferential heart and skeletal muscle tropism in mice of a Mexican T. cruzi isolate. The authors of this study also demonstrated higher sensitivity for this PCR setup compared with a commercially available enzyme-linked immunosorbent assay kit.