The Growing Role of Electron Microscopy in Anti-parasitic Drug Discovery

Parasitic diseases are a huge burden on human health causing significant morbidity and mortality. However, parasitic structure based drug discovery programmes have been hindered by a lack of high resolution structural information from parasitic derived proteins and have largely relied upon homology models from mammalian systems. The recent renaissance in electron microscopy (EM) has caused a dramatic rise in the number of structures being determined at high resolution and subsequently enabled it to be thought of as a tool in drug discovery. In this review, we discuss the challenges associated with the structural determination of parasitic proteins. We then discuss the reasons behind the resurgence in EM, how it may overcome some of these challenges and provide examples of EM derived parasitic protein structures. Finally, we discuss the challenges which EM needs to overcome before it is used as a mainstream technique in parasitic drug discovery.