Leishmania infantum is the etiological agent of visceral (VL) and a cutaneous form (CL) of leishmaniasis around the Mediterranean Basin. In order to document the parasite genetic background corresponding to this clinical diversity, chromosome size polymorphism was analysed in 32 French isolates (18 CL and 14 VL) originating from the Cévennes and the Pyrénées Orientales (PO), and corresponding t...

BACKGROUND Leishmania is an intracellular parasite infecting humans and many wild and domestic animals. Recent studies have suggested an important role for cytotoxic T cells against Leishmania. Peptide-based vaccines targeting short sequences derived from known immunogenic proteins have been shown to elicit cellular immune responses against disparate pathogens. METHODS We predicted four HLA-A...

BACKGROUND Efficient monitoring of endemic and resurgent visceral leishmaniasis (VL) requires discriminatory molecular tools that allow direct characterization of etiological agents (i.e., the Leishmania donovani complex) in host tissues. This characterization is possible through restriction fragment-length polymorphism (RFLP) analysis of polymerase chain reaction (PCR)-amplified sequences (PCR...

In this work we analyze the variability in substitution rates in the GP63 gene from Leishmania. By using a sliding window to estimate substitution rates along the gene, we found that the rate of synonymous substitutions along the GP63 gene is highly correlated with both the rate of amino acid substitution and codon bias. Furthermore, we show that comparisons involving genes that represent indep...

Pigs (3 and 10 weeks old) were infected intranasally with Aujeszky's disease virus (ADV) mutants that functionally lacked one of the non-essential genes in the unique short region of the genome (except the gene encoding the 11K protein). Virus excretion in oropharyngeal fluid and disease symptoms were monitored. Some pigs were killed to study pathogenesis, whereas others were challenged with vi...

Montenegro skin test (MST) represents the main complementary diagnostic test for tegumentary leishmaniases (TL) in endemic regions. Most antigen formulations used for the MST contain thimerosal as preservative. The Food and Drug Administration (FDA), however, recommended reducing or eliminating thimerosal from vaccines and other biological reagents and the Agência Nacional de Vigilância Sanitár...

The role of GDP dissociation inhibitor (GDI) protein in regulation of Rab cycle in Leishmania is not known. Here, we have cloned and characterized the functions of GDI homologue in vivo in Leishmania. Our results have shown that LdGDI:WT along with GDP removes the Rab5 from purified endosomes and inhibits the homotypic fusion between early endosomes. Whereas, LdGDI:R239A, a dominant negative mu...

Three adaptor molecules of the Dok family, Dok-1, Dok-2 and Dok-3 are expressed in macrophages and are involved in the negative regulation of signaling in response to lipopolysaccharide and various cytokines and growth factors. We investigated the role and the fate of these proteins following infection with Leishmania major promastigotes in macrophages. The protozoan parasite L. major causes cu...

Background: The therapy of leishmania infection is difficult and each year 1.5 million new cases of cutaneous leishmaniasis and 500,000 new cases of visceral leishmaniasis are estimated, therefore, there is a need for an effective vaccine. Monoclonal antibody (mAb) is one of the suitable methods for isolation and purification of leishmania antigens. In this report, we produced several mAb aga...