Background and Aims: Leishmaniasis is an intracellular protozoan- parasitic disease, the common vector of transmission. Both zoonotic and anthroponotic cutaneous leishmaniasis (CL) are endemic in different foci. With regard to the cutaneous form, 1.0-1.5 million cases were reported annually with 90% of the cases. Although antimony-containing compounds that are the main drugs used to treat Leish...

Inositol phosphorylceramide (IPC), the major sphingolipid in the genus Leishmania but not found in mammals, is considered a potentially useful target for chemotherapy against leishmaniasis. Leishmania (Viannia) braziliensis is endemic in Latin America and causes American tegumentary leishmaniasis. We demonstrated that IPCs are localized internally in parasites, using a specific monoclonal antib...

Leishmania infantum causes visceral leishmaniasis (VL) in the New World. The diagnosis of VL is confirmed by parasitological and serological tests, which are not always sensitive or specific. Our aim was to design new primers to perform a Polymerase Chain Reaction (PCR) for detecting L. infantum. Sequences of the minicircle kinetoplast DNA (kDNA) were obtained from GenBank, and the FLC2/RLC2 pr...

abstract          background and objective: cutaneous leishmaniasis is a parasitic disease and a health problem in different parts of iran, especially two cities of mashhad and chabahar. due to morphological similarities of most leishmania species and difference in reservoirs of l. major and l. tropica, it is necessary to determine the parasite specie to combat the disease. thus, this study use...

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...

Leishmania infections involve an acute phase of replication within macrophages, typically associated with pathology. After recovery parasites persist for long periods, which can lead to severe disease upon reactivation. Unlike the role of host factors, parasite factors affecting persistence are poorly understood. Leishmania major lacking phosphoglycans (lpg2-) were unable to survive in sand fli...

Direct drug screening against the mammalian stage of Leishmania has been hampered by cost and the time consuming effort required to accomplish it. The ability to derive transgenic Leishmania expressing reporter genes opened up new possibilities for the development of drug screening tests. Further developments to standardize and gather multiple informations could now be envisionned. We will disc...

Background: Leishmaniasis is a parasitic disease originated from species of the genus Leishmania from the Trypanosomatidae family, with three main clinical forms of cutaneous, mucocutaneous and visceral. Every year, many new cases of the disease are reported in endemic areas. Nowadays, in non-endemic regions, the incidence of the disease has also created tension. Medicine side effects, reports ...

Glutathione is the major intracellular antioxidant thiol protecting mammalian cells against oxidative stress induced by oxygen- and nitrogen-derived reactive species. In trypanosomes and leishmanias, trypanothione plays a central role in parasite protection against mammalian host defence systems by recycling trypanothione disulphide by the enzyme trypanothione reductase. Although Kinetoplastida...