visceral leishmaniasis (vl) is a sever disease that is prevalent in iran. we report a case of vl in a 3.5 year-old boy. prolonged fever, chill, abdominal distention, and weight loss were important symptoms. blood count showed pancytopenia and hypohemoglobinemia. specific anti-leishmanial antibodies were detected by serological test (ifat, dat) but no leishman body was observed in bone marrow. h...

background: parasitological methods for the diagnosis of visceral leishmania-sis (vl) require invasive procedures, so serological and molecular approaches have been developed but are not generally applicable in the field. we evaluated a loop mediated isothermal amplification (lamp) assay using blood from vl pa-tients and compared it to nested pcr. methods: forty-seven subjects with clinical fea...

Polo-like kinases (PLKs) are conserved eukaryotic cell cycle regulators, which play multiple roles, particularly during mitosis. The function of Trypanosoma brucei PLK was investigated in procyclic and bloodstream-form parasites. In procyclic trypanosomes, RNA interference (RNAi) of PLK, or overexpression of TY1-epitope-tagged PLK (PLKty), but not overexpression of a kinase-dead variant, result...

Background An outbreak of human leishmaniasis due to Leishmania infantum has been registered in an urban area southwestern Madrid, Spain, since 2010. Entomological surveys carried out the municipalities Fuenlabrada, Leganés, Getafe and Humanes de Madrid showed that Phlebotomus perniciosus is only potential vector. In this work, intensive molecular surveillance was performed P . females captured...

On the basis of partial amplification of a cloned fragment of kDNA of Leishmania infantum which is specific for this species, we developed a PCR-ELISA technique which avoids the problems associated with classical diagnostic techniques. This technique was tested on 33 L. infantum strains from 19 different zymodemes, which were recognized equally. It was also used on human and canine clinical sam...