enzyme. "This should in principle allow for designing a molecule that selectively blocks the parasite's enzyme while leaving the patient's intact", explained the other first author of the paper, Karol Nass, PhD student at the Hamburg School for Structure and Dynamics in Infection (SDI), funded by the Excellence Initiative of the German Federal State of Hamburg (LEXI), The researchers stress that while the finding raises hopes, a possible new drug is still a long way to go.

Sleeping sickness, or human African trypanosomiasis (HAT), is transmitted by the bite of the tsetse fly. The Trypanosoma parasites invade the central nervous system, and without treatment the infection is usually fatal. The disease occurs in 36 sub-Saharan countries and affects mostly poor populations living in remote rural areas. Thanks to intensifiednanometre or a ten-millionth of a millimetre). "Interestingly, this discovery comes exactly at the centenary of the publication of the famous X-ray diffraction equation by William Bragg in 1912," Chapman pointed out.

The team included members from DESY, the Universities of Hamburg, Lübeck, Tübingen, Uppsala and Gothenburg, the Arizona State University, SLAC, Lawrence Livermore National Laboratory, the Max Planck institute for medical research in Heidelberg and the Max Planck advanced study group at CFEL. CFEL is a joint venture of DESY, the Max Planck society and the University of Hamburg. DESY is the leading German accelerator centre and one of the leading worldwide.

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