Leishmania major is a protozoan parasite that causes cutaneous Leishmaniasis disease in human beings and animals. The disease is prevalent in tropical and semitropical countries and has great health importance. The present study aimed to identify the histological changes in the organs infected with L. major and to provide a sophisticated diagnostic method for infection through detecting TGF-β cytokine by immunohistochemistry technique(IHC) from October 2020 to January 2021. A total of 40 samples of paraffin blocks were used for different organs including skin, spleen, liver, kidney, and heart of male and female BALB/c mice, aged 6-8 weeks, which were previously infected subcutaneously with L. major promastigotes at a dose of 1×107 promast

Leishmaniosis is a tropical neglected parasitic disease that is endemic in many countries, including Middle East, with no existing effective vaccines. The bite of female sand-fly transmits the causative agent, Leishmania spp., to humans. High toxicity, resistance and treatment failure of the available chemotherapy against visceral leishmaniosis demands the investigation of new anti-leishmanial compounds. Lupeol is a form of triterpene isolated from several medicinal plants and possesses an antimicrobial property. In this study, cytotoxic effect of lupeol was screened against the mammalian amastigotes form and insect promastigote form of Leishmania donovani, following three cycles of incubation at different concentrations by MTT assay. Resul

      Visceral leishmaniasis (VL), the second-most-serious parasitic illness after malaria, is currently endemic in more than 88 countries. Need for new anti-leishmanial compounds is currently being taken into consideration by researchers due to resistance and lack of effective vaccinations. This research was conducted to find out more about the effect of artemisinin (ART). ART was examined in vitro promastigotes stages and ex vivo amastigotes stages of the Iraqi strain of Leishmania donovani in U937 cell line after 24, 48 and 27 hours using MTT assay. In addition, the level of macrophage nitric oxide (NO) was measured using Griess assay in U937 cell line. The results of promastigotes viability percentage

An isolate of Leishmania major was grown on the semisolid medium and incubated at 26ºC. The isolate was irradiated by He: Ne laser (632.8 nm, 10 mW) at exposure times (5, 10, 15, 20, 25, 30) minutes in their respective order. The unirradiated groups represent control group. Growth rate and percentage of viability were examined during six days after irradiation. The change in these two parameters reflects the effect of irradiation on the parasite. The results refers that the general growth effected by irradiation in comparison with un irradiation group, The growth rate of parasite decrease with increasing the exposure time in comparison with control group. Parasite viability decrease with irradiation and the percentage of living cell dec

Cutaneous leishmaniasis (CL) is the most form of leishmaniasis disease prevalent in Iraq. CL remains a public health problem in numerous endemic countries because of the absence of safe, effective, and high-cost drugs for treatment. Macrophages are the main inhabitant cell for Leishmania; they phagocyte and allow parasite multiplying. Phagocytosis and anti-leishmanial activity of macrophage are the main factors in the elimination of Leishmania parasites. Phagosome-resident amastigotes also evade innate host defense mechanisms. Silver nanoparticles (Ag NPs) have an important effect in stimulating the production of oxygen species. The objective of this study was to examine macrophages cytotoxicity upon exposure to L. tropica and Ag NPs. Se

Leishmaniasis is an endemic disease in Iraq, where both forms of the disease, cutaneous and visceral, are found. The effect of Zinc oxide nanoparticles (ZnO NPs) with mean particle size less than 100 nanometer (nm) on viability and growth rate of Leishmania donovani promastigotes was evaluated. The anti-leishmanial activity of different concentrations (0.1, 0.2, 0.4, 0.6, 0.8, and 1 μg/ml) of ZnO NPs was investigated on promastigotes growth rates and viability in comparison to promastigotes exposed to the same concentrations of sodium stibogluconate (Sb) (pentostam).The inhibitory concentrations (IC50s) of ZnO NPs were calculated after 24 , 48 and 72 hr which were (0.871, 0.156 and 0.120 μg/ml) respectively with significant (p< 0.05

Leishmaniasis is a widespread parasitic disease that occurs as a result of infection with a unicellular parasite belonging to the genus Leishmania. Diagnosis by conventional methods is inaccurate and is not sensitive to confirm the genus infection. Here, we have investigated a methods for Leishmania genus diagnosis, which includes the technique of polymerase chain reaction to detect the presence of the parasite at in vitro for promastigote cultures using three genus-specific primer pairs to amplify HSP70, ITS, and ITS2. The results showed single band of ~1422, ~1020, and ~550 respectively. This study has proved the ability of these primer pairs to detect Leishmania infection and recommend them to be used for detection of leishmaniasis in

Leishmaniasis is one of the important parasitic diseases, affecting mainly low social class people indeveloping countries, and is more prevalent and endemic in the tropical and subtropical regions of old worldand new world. Despite ofbroad distribution in Iraq,little known about the geneticcharacteristics of thecausative agents. So this study was aimed to evaluate the genetic varietyoftwo IraqiLeishmaniatropicaisolatesbased on heat shock protein gene sequence 70 (HSP70) in comparison with universal isolates recordedsequences data. After amplification and sequencing of HSP70 gene,the obtainedresults were alignment alongwith homologous Leishmania sequences retrieved from NCBI by using BLAST. The analysis results showedpresence of particular g

Cutaneous leishmaniasis is one of endemic diseases in Iraq. It is considered as widely health problem and is an uncontrolled disease. The aim of the study is to identify of Leishmania species that cause skin lesions among patients in Thi-Qar Province, South of Iraq, also to detect some virulence factors of L. tropica. This study includes three local locations, Al-Hussein Teaching, Suq Al-Shyokh General and Al-Shatrah General Hospitals in Province for the period from the beginning of December 2018 to the end of September 2019. The samples were collected from 80 patients suffering from cutaneous leishmaniasis, both genders, different ages, various residence places and single and multiple lesions. Nested-PCR technique was

Visceral Leishmaniasis (VL) is a disseminated protozoan infection caused by Leishmania donovani parasites which affects almost half a million persons annually. Classical diagnosis methods of VL still not very sensitive and time consuming. In this study, we reported the success of polymerase chain reaction (PCR) method to identify L. donovani based on kinetoplast deoxyribonucleic acid (kDNA) for the diagnosis of the parasite using in vitro promastigote cultures. LdI species - specific primer was used to identify L. donovani and the result showed a single band of about ~600bp. It can be recommended that this primer is to be used for detection the visceral L. donovani.