Purified mitochondria of Leishmania tarentolae contain 3'-terminal uridylyltransferase and RNA ligase activities which can be solubilized by detergent lysis of the organelle. Run-off transcription of maxicircle and minicircle DNA also occurs in intact and Triton-lysed mitochondria, using [32P]GTP as the labeled precursor. Heparin inhibits the solubilized terminal uridylyltransferase activity bu...

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...

We studied the intramitochondrial localization of several multiprotein complexes involved in U-insertion/deletion RNA editing in trypanosome mitochondria. The editing complexes are located in one or two antipodal nodes adjacent to the kinetoplast DNA (kDNA) disk, which are distinct from but associated with the minicircle catenation nodes. In some cases the proteins are in a bilateral sheet conf...

Guide RNAs (gRNAs) for the editing of sites 1-8 of COIII mRNA and an "unexpected" partially edited COIII mRNA are encoded in the variable regions of specific kinetoplast DNA minicircles. The gRNAs can form 37 and 44 nucleotide perfect hybrids (allowing for G-U base pairs) with edited mRNAs. The gRNAs were detected on Northern blots and shown to have unique 5' ends situated close to the beginnin...

BACKGROUND Conventional plasmids for gene therapy produce low-level and short-term gene expression. In this study, we develop a novel nonviral vector that robustly and persistently expresses the hypoxia-inducible factor-1 alpha (HIF-1alpha) therapeutic gene in the heart, leading to functional benefits after myocardial infarction. METHODS AND RESULTS We first created minicircles (MC) carrying ...