A 39-year-old Honduran man with a history of AIDS (CD4 5 68/mm ) and suspected visceral leishmaniasis (VL) was referred to the hematology clinic for pancytopenia. The patient was diagnosed with cutaneous leishmaniasis on skin biopsy 1.5 years prior, which was determined to be Leishmania donovani chagasi. The patient received an initial liposomal amphotericin B regimen, followed by maintenance m...

Visceral leishmaniasis is one of the most important sever diseases in tropical and subtropical countries. In the present study the effects of antimony sulfide nanoparticles on Leishmania infantum in vitro were evaluated. Antimony sulfide NPs (Sb(2)S(5)) were synthesized by biological method from Serratia marcescens bacteria. Then the cytotoxicity effects of different concentrations (5, 10, 25, ...

To complete its life cycle, protozoan parasites of the genus Leishmania undergo at least three major developmental transitions. However, previous efforts to identify genes showing stage regulated changes in transcript abundance have yielded relatively few. Here we used expression profiling to assess changes in transcript abundance in three stages: replicating promastigotes and infective non-rep...

The Leishmania tarentolae Parrot-TarII strain genome sequence was resolved to an average 16-fold mean coverage by next-generation DNA sequencing technologies. This is the first non-pathogenic to humans kinetoplastid protozoan genome to be described thus providing an opportunity for comparison with the completed genomes of pathogenic Leishmania species. A high synteny was observed between all se...

Leishmania amazonensis is one of the major etiological agents of the neglected, stigmatizing disease termed american cutaneous leishmaniasis (ACL). ACL is a zoonosis and rodents are the main reservoirs. Most cases of ACL are reported in Brazil, Bolivia, Colombia and Peru. The biological cycle of the parasite is digenetic because sand fly vectors transmit the motile promastigote stage to the mam...

The intracellular amastigote stages of parasites such as Leishmania are often referred to as aflagellate. They do, however, possess a short axoneme of cryptic function. Here, our examination of the structure of this axoneme leads to a testable hypothesis of its role in the cell biology of pathogenicity. We show a striking similarity between the microtubule axoneme structure of the Leishmania me...

BACKGROUND The flagellate protozoan parasite, Trypanosoma cruzi, is a causative agent of Chagas disease that is transmitted by reduviid bugs to humans. The parasite exists in multiple morphological forms in both vector and host, and cell differentiation in T. cruzi is tightly associated with stage-specific protein synthesis and degradation. However, the specific molecular mechanisms responsible...

Parasite of the genus Leishmania is reliant on the salvage pathway for recycling of ribonucleotides. A class I nuclease enzyme also known as P4 nuclease is involved in salvage of purines in cutaneous Leishmania species but the relevant enzymes have not been characterized in Leishmania infantum (L. infantum). The aim of this study was to clone and characterize the gene encoding class I nuclease ...

BACKGROUND In a screen of extracts from plants and fungi to detect antileishmanial activity, we found that the ethyl acetate extract of the fungus Nectria pseudotrichia, isolated from the tree Caesalpinia echinata (Brazilwood), is a promising source of bioactive compounds. OBJECTIVES The aims of this study were to isolate and determine the chemical structures of the compounds responsible for th...

Kinetoplastid glycosomes contain a variety of metabolic activities, such as glycolysis, beta-oxidation of fatty acids, lipid biosynthesis, and purine salvage. One advantage of sequestering metabolic activities is the avoidance of cellular oxidative damage by reactive oxygen species produced as a by-product of metabolism. Little is known about how glycosomes themselves withstand these toxic meta...