Fig. 1

Time course of the GFP fluorescence after microinjection of intact Taenia crassiceps cysticerci. a GFP-TOPO plasmid (1–3) and a GFP-negative plasmid: pCMV-VSV-G (4) microinjected cysts, after 24 (1 and 4); 48 (2) and 72 h (3). Photographs were taken using an Olympus DSU confocal system with a FITC (450–490 nm) filter under the same conditions for all cases. b Western blots using crude extracts of GFP-TOPO (1–3) and pCMV-VSV-G (5) microinjected cysts; 24 (1 and 5); 48 (2) and 72 (3) h post microinjection. A crude extract of HEK 293 cells transfected with GFP-TOPO (4) is also shown as a positive control. 50 µg of each crude extract were loaded on each lane in the gel and all blots were obtained from a single gel run. For detection of GFP, a polyclonal rabbit IgG α-GFP antibody and a goat α-rabbit IgG antibody conjugated with horseradish peroxidase were used at 1:1000 and 1:10,000 dilutions, respectively. Loading controls (6–10) used a sheep anti-mouse albumin polyclonal antibody followed by a horseradish peroxidase conjugated anti-sheep IgG secondary antibody (Aldridge et al. 2006). Development of peroxidase was carried out using an enhanced chemiluminescence kit