Anopheles, plasmodium, leishmania

Parasites including helminthes, protozoa, and medical arthropod vectors are a major cause of global infectious diseases, affecting one-sixth of the world's population, which are responsible for enormous levels of morbidity and mortality important and remain impediments to economic development especially in tropical countries. Prevalent drug resistance, lack of highly effective and practical vaccines, as well as specific and sensitive diagnostic markers are proving to be challenging problems in parasitic disease control in most parts of the world...

UNLABELLED: Malaria is transmitted when motile sporozoites are injected into the dermis by an infected female Anopheles mosquito. Inside the mosquito vector, sporozoites egress from midgut-associated oocysts and eventually penetrate the acinar cells of salivary glands. Parasite-encoded factors with exclusive vital roles in the insect vector can be studied by classical reverse genetics. Here, we characterized the in vivo roles of Plasmodium berghei falstatin/ICP (inhibitor of cysteine proteases)...

The interaction of a parasite and a host cell is a complex process, which involves several steps: (1) attachment to the plasma membrane, (2) entry inside the host cell, and (3) hijacking of the metabolism of the host. In biochemical experiments, only an event averaged over the whole cell population can be analyzed. The power of microscopy, however, is to investigate individual events in individual cells. Therefore, parasitologists frequently perform experiments with fluorescence microscopy using different dyes to label structures of the parasite or the host cell...

From 1994 to 1995 four presumably autochthonous malaria cases were diagnosed by blood smear microscopy in Evros Province, northern Greece. Alarmed by these unexpected infections a serological survey was performed from 1997 to 1999 in ten rural villages, including those where the malaria cases had occurred. Among the 1,102 blood samples examined, nine turned out to contain specific antibodies against plasmodial parasites as detected by indirect fluorescent antibody test, including two of the former patients...

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