Recently discovered R2TP complex is an important multiprotein complex involved in multiple cellular process like snoRNP biogenesis, PIKK signaling, RNA polymerase II assembly and apoptosis. Within R2TP complex, Pih1 tightly interacts with Rvb1/Rvb2 and with Tah1 to form R2TP macromolecular complex. R2TP complex further interacts with Hsp90 to form R2TP-Hsp90 complex, which has been found critic...

Leishmania parasite isolation from the human aspirates is always challenging due to most probability of the fungal contamination and the use of antifungal drug which could support the selective growth of the Leishmania parasite. In this study, we examine the effect of antifungal drug caspofungin on the promastigote stage of Leishmania donovani. Promastigote parasite was cultivated in M199 + 20%...

Laboratory mice display features of bona fide hosts for parasites such as Leishmania major and Leishmania donovani. Characterizing the amastigote population size fluctuations and the mouse transcript abundance accounting for these fluctuations demands the capacity to record in real time and integrate quantitative multiparametric datasets from the host tissues where these processes occur. To thi...

We have found that an important Th2 cytokine, IL-10, is produced by tissues from patients acutely infected with Leishmania donovani. In all individuals tested, IL-10 mRNA production was increased in lymph nodes taken during acute disease over that observed in postacute samples. In contrast, both pre- and posttreatment lymph nodes had readily detected mRNA for IFN-gamma and IL-2. A down-regulati...

Functional impairment of dendritic cells (DCs) is part of a survival strategy evolved by Leishmania and Plasmodium parasites to evade host immune responses. Here, the effects of co-exposing human monocyte-derived DCs to Leishmania donovani promastigotes and Plasmodium falciparum-infected erythrocytes were investigated. Co-stimulation resulted in a dual, dose-dependent effect on DC differentiati...

OBJECTIVES This study focuses on the mechanism of interaction of sitamaquine with Leishmania donovani membranes, and its accumulation within the parasites. METHODS A biomimetic model of the outer layer of a Leishmania plasma membrane was used to examine the interactions of sitamaquine with lipids. The plasma membranes of L. donovani promastigotes were depleted of sterol using cholesterol oxid...

Abstract MicroRNA-21 (miR-21) inhibits IL-12 expression and impairs the Th1 response necessary for control of Leishmania infection. Recent studies have shown that infection induces miR-21 in dendritic cells macrophages, inhibition restores expression. Because is known to be expressed due inflammatory stimuli a wide range hematopoietic cells, we investigated role regulating immune responses duri...

The Leishmania donovani complex, which consists of L. donovani, L. infantum-L. chagasi, and L. archibaldi, is responsible for visceral manifestations of leishmaniasis. Multilocus enzyme electrophoresis is the standard method for the characterization and identification of strains of Leishmania. For L. infantum, the predominance of zymodeme MON-1 significantly reduces the discriminative power of ...

Studies of Leishmania donovani have shown that both ornithine decarboxylase and spermidine synthase, two enzymes of the polyamine biosynthetic pathway, are critical for promastigote proliferation and required for maximum infection in mice. However, the importance of arginase (ARG), the first enzyme of the polyamine pathway in Leishmania, has not been analyzed in L. donovani To test ARG function...