Therefore, the parasite must have strategies to cope with the challenges presented by such environmental variations as well as mechanisms to adapt to and take advantage of them. In this sense, the intestinal environment of the insect host is particularly relevant, and the microbes and chemicals encountered in such an environment are likely to affect the parasite-host interaction and the fate of the association. Indeed, many molecules present in the intestinal tract of triatomine hosts have been shown to affect T. cruzi. For instance, the hemolytic factor present in the stomach of R. prolixus has the capacity to lyse the epimastigote forms of some 
T. cruzi strains but not others. Lectins can agglutinate some T. cruzi strains. Additionally, studies of bacterial strains isolated from the triatomine gut revealed that strains of Serratia marcescens, the predominant bacterial species found in Rhodnius and Triatoma, are able to lyse epimastigote forms of T. cruzi. Altogether, these observations show that a myriad of compounds found in the triatomine gut have a decisive influence in the infectious process and determine whether T. cruzi can successfully establish itself in the vector host, which will subsequently determine its capacity to spread through human populations. We have recently shown that although the intestinal microbiota of triatomines is lacking in bacterial species diversity, it displays marked specificity with certain bacteria associated with different insect vectors. Understanding the molecular basis of the vector-parasite-commensal bacteria triad may aid in our knowledge of their determinants and the epidemiology of T. cruzi nfections in humans and in the identification of promising Lomitapide Mesylate therapeutics. Therefore, we set out to study the chemical environment of the triatomine gut through a powerful, highthroughput metabolomics approach. Our results indicate that metabolic variation among triatomine species is obvious even in laboratory conditions. We describe the identification of uniform and variable cores of metabolites in three different triatomine species. Our results provide a basis for further investigations of the interplay between T. cruzi and the triatomine digestive tract and how this may come into play during vector colonization, especially in the hindgut, where parasite metacyclogenesis occurs. Ultimately, understanding metabolic variations may allow the identification of factors regulating parasite growth and assist in the development of anti-parasitic drugs. DI-FT-ICR-MS is a technique that enables the precise quantitative characterization of metabolites in a biological sample by data accumulation, allowing the fast and accurate derivation of the metabolic profile associated with a sample. However, one drawback to this method is that the qualitative characterization of each molecular specimen relies on the comparison of its molecular weight with preexisting information stored in a database. As is common with such approaches, a lack of information in databases precludes the full characterization of a set of samples. In this report, we studied the fecal metabolome of three species of triatomines, the insect vectors of T. cruzi and, hence, Chagas disease. To Chlorhexidine hydrochloride obtain putative identities of the metabolic features detected, we searched the Human Metabolome Database due to the lack of an appropriate database for triatomine samples. The HMDB has wide metabolic coverage, currently containing information on more than 40,000 metabolites, which prompted us to use this database for our studies.