Leishmania parasites alternate in their life cycle between promastigote stages that develop in the gut of phlebotomine sand flies and amastigotes residing inside phagocytic cells of vertebrate hosts. For experimental infections of sand flies, promastigotes are frequently used as this way of infection is technically easier although ingestion of promastigotes by sand flies is unnatural. Here we a...

BACKGROUND & OBJECTIVES The severe toxicity, exorbitant cost and emerging resistance of Leishmania species against most of the currently used drugs underscores the urgent need for the alternative drugs. The present study evaluates in vitro anti-leishmanial activity of Plumeria bicolor and its isolated compounds. METHODS The in vitro anti-parasitic activity of chloroform extract of Plumeria bi...

recent scientific evidence indicates that distinct patterns of susceptibility in balb/c mice to leishmania major infection are attributable to the differential expansion of distinct cd4+ t-cell subsets and their cytokines production. production of the th1 cytokine ifn-g is associated with resistance, whereas production of the th2 cytokines il-4 and il-10 are associated with extreme susceptibili...

In Leishmania major a 100-kDa heat shock protein, Hsp100, is abundant in the intracellular amastigote stage which persists in the mammalian host. A replacement of both clpB alleles which encode Hsp100 does not affect promastigote viability under standard culture conditions but impairs thermotolerance in vitro. In experimental infections of BALB/c inbred mice, the lack of Hsp100 in the gene repl...

In the present study, we investigated the antileishmanial activity of sesquiterpene elatol, the major constituent of the Brazilian red seaweed Laurencia dendroidea (Hudson) J.V. Lamouroux, against L. amazonensis. Elatol after 72 h of treatment, showed an IC(50) of 4.0 μM and 0.45 μM for promastigote and intracellular amastigote forms of L. amazonensis, respectively. By scanning and transmission...

Promastigotes of the protozoan parasite Leishmania are inoculated into the mammalian host by an infected sandfly and are phagocytosed by macrophages. There, they differentiate into amastigotes, which replicate in phagolysosomes. A family of glycoconjugates, the phosphoglycans (PGs), plays an important role in the ability of promastigotes to survive the potentially microbicidal consequences of p...

The promastigote surface antigen-2 (PSA-2) complex comprises a group of immunogenic surface antigens linked to the surface of the Leishmania major promastigote with glycosylphosphatidylinositol anchors. The L. major genome contains at least 14 PSA-2 genes on a 950-kilobase chromosome and comprising approximately 20% of the length of this chromosome. The sequence of three independent, but incomp...