IDENTIFICATION OF DIFFERENTIALLY EXPRESSED GENES AMONG LEISHMANIA SPECIES

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This subproject is one of many research subprojects utilizing the resources provided by a Center grant funded by NIH/NCRR. Primary support for the subproject and the subproject's principal investigator may have been provided by other sources, including other NIH sources. The Total Cost listed for the subproject likely represents the estimated amount of Center infrastructure utilized by the subproject, not direct funding provided by the NCRR grant to the subproject or subproject staff. The long term goal of this project is to identify and characterize differentially expressed genes in Leishmania that may be used as potential novel targets for the development of new drug therapies for the treatment of leishmaniasis. At least 12 million people in Africa, India and Latin America are infected with Leishmania, and 350 million are at risk. Moreover, the thousands of US troops currently deployed in endemic areas (i.e. the Middle East) are at significant risk for contracting the parasite and significant disease. It is poorly understood which genes and how many proteins are involved in the survival and virulence of the pathogenic species of Leishmania. We hypothesize that differences in the expression of genes among and between pathogenic and non pathogenic species should identify some of the genes that are critical to the survival and important to the virulence of these parasites. Thus, in the current study we will identify differentially expressed genes between pathogenic and nonpathogenic species of Leishmania by cDNAAFLP and subsequently characterize these genes by sub cloning the amplified fragments and subjecting them to DNA sequence and analyses. The characterization of genes differentially expressed between pathogenic and non pathogenic species is a first step in identifying potential novel targets for the development of nontoxic drugs to be used in the treatment of leishmaniasis, a devastating and potentially fatal collection of human diseases.