For years, microbiologists knew about this sort of grouping behavior in bacteria, but it had never been observed before in microbes like the sleeping sickness parasite.

"So we're really, really excited about it because it was kind of a really new observation," Hill says. "It was something we weren't expecting. And it turns out that once we discovered it, if we look at other microbes and bacteria, we kind of felt that we were a little surprised we didn't see it before."

According to Hill, the discovery of this previously-unknown aspect of the parasite's lifecycle opens up new possibilities for disrupting that lifecycle to stop the disease.

For example, when they are grouped together, the individual parasites communicate with each other by exchanging proteins, which bind to receptors on the surface of the cell.

"And so what we've got now are proteins on the parasite that are accessible on live cells to small molecules - meaning like drugs - that you could add to live cells, and they interfere with behavior of the parasite. And so we hope that this will lead to more ability to develop drugs for targets that are accessible on the parasites."

Although this work is still very much in the early research stage, Hill says it's possible that if drugs can be developed to target the sleeping sickness parasite, the same general principle might also be used against the parasites that carry some other tropical diseases including malaria and leishmaniasis.