background: leishmania is an obligatory intracellular protozoan parasite, which infects human be­ings when infected sand fly vector takes a blood meal.  most efforts are towards designing an effective vaccine to prevent leishmaniasis. in this way, development of candidate antigen for vaccine has spe­cial im­portant. in this study, we cloned mannose-1-phosphate guanyltransferase gene of iranian ...

Cutaneous leishmaniasis is a zoonotic, vector-borne disease causing a major health problem in several countries. No vaccine is available and there are limitations associated with the current therapeutic regimens. Immune responses to sand fly saliva have been shown to protect against Leishmania infection. A cellular immune response to PpSP15, a protein from the sand fly Phlebotomus papatasi, was...

Despite inducing very low IFN-γ response and highly attenuated in vivo, infection of mice with phosphoglycan (PG) deficient Leishmania major (lpg2-) induces protection against virulent L. major challenge. Here, we show that mice infected with lpg2- L. major generate Leishmania-specific memory T cells. However, in vitro and in vivo proliferation, IL-10 and IFN-γ production by lpg2- induced memor...

BACKGROUND The goal of this study was to know the identity of Leishmania species responsible of cutaneous leishmaniasis (CL) in Fars Province, southern Iran. METHODS Five counties of Shiraz, Firouz Abad, Ghir-Karzin, Farashband and Larestan were prospected. Forty-four patients exhibiting cutaneous lesions were selected. Samples collected on skin lesions were examined both microscopically (aft...

Background: Zoonotic cutaneous leishmaniasis (ZCL) is a polymorphic disease which may show various clinical manifestations. Although genetic variability of the parasite is suggested to be one of the factors influencing clinical manifestations in leishmaniasis, no data exist regarding genetic polymorphism of Leishmania major. Therefore, determination of genetic variation within the species of L....

Background: Characterization of Leishmania parasites is necessary for epidemiological objectives such as documenting the distribution of predominant species and designing appropriate control measures. In this study, we aimed to identify Leishmania species isolated from cutaneous leishmaniasis (CL) patients, using RAPD-PCR method. Methods: This descriptive, cross-sectional study was designed aga...

Extrachromosomal DNA elements have been identified in wild-type populations of the parasitic protozoan Leishmania. Elements from L. major and L. tropica were detected using orthogonal-field-alternation-gel electrophoresis. They are nonhomologous, supercoiled circular DNA molecules derived from different chromosomes in the Leishmania genome. Electron microscopy revealed that the elements have ve...

Several approaches have been previously used to elucidate the genetic basis of Leishmania virulence. In general, they were based on laboratory Leishmania clones genetically modified or grown in the presence of selecting agents. In a previous study, we demonstrated that Leishmania major freshly isolated from human cutaneous lesions showed significant differences in the severity of the experiment...

P-glycoproteins are responsible for multidrug resistance in tumor cell lines and are thought to have a physiologic role in exporting cellular metabolites. We now report that a P-glycoprotein gene in the H region of the trypanosomatid protozoan Leishmania confers resistance to heavy metals when present in multiple copies. The Leishmania H region is frequently amplified in drug-resistant lines an...

The characterization of expressed sequence tags (ESTs) generated from a cDNA library of Leishmania (Leishmania) amazonensis amastigotes is described. The sequencing of 93 clones generated new L. (L.) amazonensis ESTs from which 32% are not related to any other sequences in database and 68% presented significant similarities to known genes. The chromosome localization of some L. (L.) amazonensis...