Cysteine proteinases are hypothesized to be important virulence factors of Entamoeba histolytica, the causative agent of amebic dysentery and liver abscesses. The release of a histolytic cysteine proteinase from E. histolytica correlates with the pathogenicity of both axenic strains and recent clinical isolates as determined by clinical history of invasive disease, zymodeme analysis, and cytopa...

The Leishmania donovani complex, which consists of L. donovani, L. infantum-L. chagasi, and L. archibaldi, is responsible for visceral manifestations of leishmaniasis. Multilocus enzyme electrophoresis is the standard method for the characterization and identification of strains of Leishmania. For L. infantum, the predominance of zymodeme MON-1 significantly reduces the discriminative power of ...

Leishmaniasis represents a serious threat to the health as one of the most important neglected tropical diseases as designated by the World Health Organization. The disease is endemic in 82 countries, among them Tunisia is an indigenous area for cutaneous Leishmaniasis. In a previous work, two tritepenic acids namely oleanolic and maslinic acids have been isolated from olive leaf extract. In th...

background: surveillance of the canine reservoir is highly important to help control of visceral leishmaniasis in human. it is therefore imperative to improve and develop new tools reliable, easy to use, and cheap for the diagnosis of canine leishmani asis. k39 sub recombinant antigen of leishmania infantum was expressed in prokaryotic system and evaluated for sero-diagnosis of canine visceral ...

Ecto-nucleotidase activity is involved in the infection process of Leishmania and various other parasites that enables modulation of host immune responses to promote disease progression. One of the enzymes responsible for this activity is the ecto-nucleoside triphosphate diphosphohydrolase (E-NTPDase). The enzyme hydrolyzes nucleotides tri- and/or di-phosphate into monophosphate products, which...

Several parameters should be addressed before incriminating a vector for Leishmania transmission. Those may include its ability to become infected by the same Leishmania species found in humans, the degree of attractiveness for reservoirs and humans and capacity to sustain parasite infection under laboratory conditions. This study evaluated the vectorial capacity of Lutzomyia cruzi for Leishman...

Lainson and Rangel (2005) have recently published a consistent review on Lutzomyia longipalpis (Diptera: Psychodidae) and visceral leishmaniasis (VL) in the Americas, with particular attention to the eco-epidemiology of disease in Brazil. In their review, they have discussed with property the taxonomic position and origin of the causal agent of the disease. However, I would like to add some com...

Cysteine proteinases (CPs) are synthesized as zymogens and converted to mature proteinase forms by proteolytic cleavage and release of their pro domain peptides. A cDNA encoding a papain-like CP, called hgcp-Iv, was isolated from a Heterodera glycines J2 cDNA library, expressed and utilized to assess the ability of its propeptide to inhibit proteinase in its active form. The hgcp-Iv cDNA sequen...

A new method in differentiation of chiral molecules is reported based on the fluorescence quenching of functionalized CdS quantum dots (CdS-QDs) as nanosensor by differing in the chirality of functionalization species. The chemically functionalized CdS-QDs with strong yellow emission were prepared using chiral L-cysteine (L-Cyst) and D-cysteine (D-Cyst) molecules. Then, the functionalized CdS-Q...