A unique, highly conserved secretory invertase is differentially expressed by promastigote developmental forms of all species of the human pathogen, Leishmania.

ABSTRACT: Leishmania are protozoan pathogens of humans that exist as extracellular promastigotes in the gut of their sand fly vectors and as obligate intracellular amastigotes within phagolysosomes of infected macrophages. Between infectious blood meal feeds, sand flies take plant juice meals that contain sucrose and store these sugars in their crop. Such sugars are regurgitated into the sand fly anterior midgut where they impact the developing promastigote parasite population. In this report we showed that promastigotes of all Leishmania species secreted an invertase/sucrase enzyme during their growth in vitro. In contrast, neither L. donovani nor L. mexicana amastigotes possessed any detectable invertase activity. Importantly, no released/secreted invertase activity was detected in culture superna

SUBMITTER: Lyda TA 

PROVIDER: S-EPMC4417071 | biostudies-literature | 2015 Jun

REPOSITORIES: biostudies-literature