BACKGROUND The binding of Leishmania promastigotes to the midgut epithelium is regarded as an essential part of the life-cycle in the sand fly vector, enabling the parasites to persist beyond the initial blood meal phase and establish the infection. However, the precise nature of the promastigote stage(s) that mediate binding is not fully understood. METHODOLOGY/PRINCIPAL FINDINGS To address ...

Leishmaniasis and dirofilariasis are parasitic diseases of humans and dogs, worldwide, and they are often found as coinfections in endemic areas. Cases of human and canine dirofilariasis have being reported in Greece and leishmaniasis is endemic in most prefectures in humans and dogs. In most cases, dirofilariasis is established by parasitological (the modified Knott’s test) and/or immunologica...

Leishmaniases is a group of diseases caused by the protozoan parasite belonging to the genus Leishmania. At least 20 species of Leishmania are known to infect humans transmitted by female sandflies, Phlebotomus spp. Leishmania donovani causes visceral leishmaniasis, considered most lethal among the common three forms of leishmaniasis. Lack of appropriate vaccines, emergence of drug resistance a...

Despite recent advances in the treatment of some forms of leishmaniasis, the available drugs are still far from ideal due to inefficacy, parasite resistance, toxicity and cost. The wide-spectrum antimicrobial activity of 2-nitrovinylfuran compounds has been described, as has their activity against Trichomonas vaginalis and other protozoa. Thus, the aim of this study was to test the antileishman...

To investigate the role of clathrin-mediated trafficking during the Leishmania lifecycle, open reading frames encoding clathrin heavy chain and the beta-adaptins, major components of the adaptor complexes, have been analysed both in silico and experimentally. The Leishmania genome encodes three beta-adaptins, which arose at a time predating speciation of these divergent trypanosomatids. Unlike ...

HSP90 is an abundant protein in Leishmania parasites that plays a major role in the parasite survival under stress conditions. Here we found that the HSP90 inhibitor 17-AAG (≥100nM 17-AAG) induced cell cycle arrest at G0/G1 in Leishmania infantum and Leishmania panamensis promastigotes, and highly potentiated the induction of cell death by an apoptotic-like process mediated by the ether phospho...

background: leishmaniases are a group of diseases caused by leishmania parasites .  growing of drug unresponsiveness in leishmaniasis patients necessitates the development of new drugs and accor­dingly a suitable assay is needed for evaluation of any modalities.  the aim of this study was to compare four drug assays methods, agar dilution, broth dilution, cylinder plate and disk diffusion, for ...

We report here the characterization of a novel Leishmania infantum protein termed papLe22 (22-kDa potentially aggravating protein of Leishmania). A positive clone from a cDNA library was identified by serum of a visceral leishmaniasis (VL) patient. Full-length cDNA obtained using rapid amplification of cDNA ends-PCR codes for a 22-kDa protein. In L. infantum promastigotes an endogenous nuclear ...

Casein kinase 1 (CK1) plays an important role in eukaryotic signaling pathways, and their substrates include key regulatory proteins involved in cell differentiation, proliferation and chromosome segregation. The Leishmania genome encodes six potential CK1 isoforms, of which five have orthologs in other trypanosomatidae. Leishmania donovani CK1 isoform 4 (Ldck1.4, orthologous to LmjF27.1780) is...