Leptospirosis is an emerging zoonosis caused by pathogenic spirochetes belonging to the genus Leptospira. An understanding of leptospiral protein expression regulation is needed to develop new immunoprotective and serodiagnostic strategies. We used the humoral immune response during human leptospirosis as a reporter of protein antigens expressed during infection. Qualitative and quantitative im...

BACKGROUND Leptospirosis is caused by pathogenic spirochetes of the genus Leptospira. The bacteria enter the human body via abraded skin or mucous membranes and may disseminate throughout. In general the clinical picture is mild but some patients develop rapidly progressive, severe disease with a high case fatality rate. Not much is known about the innate immune response to leptospires during h...

The prokaryotic ubiquitous Toxin-Antitoxin (TA) operons encode a stable toxin and an unstable antitoxin. The most accepted hypothesis of the physiological function of the TA system is the reversible cessation of cellular growth under stress conditions. The major TA family, VapBC is present in the spirochaete Leptospira interrogans. VapBC modules are classified based on the presence of a predict...

Although leptospirosis is known to have occurred in India since the early years of the 20th century, no accurate data on disease burden exist. During the past two decades, leptospirosis cases have been reported with increasing frequency from different parts of the country. Several large outbreaks have occurred. In the year 2000, the Indian Council of Medical Research set up a Task Force on Lept...

Published Ahead of Print 17 September 2008. 10.1128/CVI.00214-08. 2008, 15(11):1715. DOI: Clin. Vaccine Immunol. Nascimento Kirchgatter, Silvio A. Vasconcellos and Ana L. T. O. Morais, Eliete C. Romero, Roberta M. Blanco, Karin Tatiane R. Oliveira, Mariana T. Longhi, Zenaide M. de Enzyme-Linked Immunosorbent Assays Diagnosis of Leptospirosis by Antigens MPL17 and MPL21 for Serological Evaluatio...

background leptospirosis is an important zoonotic disease caused by pathogenic leptospira which can infect both humans and animals. this disease is caused by various serovars of leptospira interrogans sensu lato infection. rats are known to be one of the most important reservoirs and transmission sources of leptospirosis. however, the status of leptospirosis in wild rats has been unknown in man...

Leptospirosis is a zoonotic disease caused by the pathogenic Leptospira spp. The clinical presentations are diverse, ranging from undifferentiated fever to fulminant disease including meningeal forms. The neurological leptospirosis forms are usually neglected. The aim of this study was to investigate leptospirosis as the cause of aseptic meningitis using different diagnostic techniques includin...

We report the cloning of the gene encoding a 36-kDa leptospiral outer membrane lipoprotein, designated LipL36. We obtained the N-terminal amino acid sequence of a staphylococcal V8 proteolytic-digest fragment in order to design an oligonucleotide probe. A Lambda-Zap II library containing EcoRI fragments of Leptospira kirschneri DNA was screened, and a 2.3-kb DNA fragment which contained the ent...