''Leishmania infantum'' is the causative agent of infantile visceral leishmaniasis in the

Mediterranean The Mediterranean Sea ( ) is a sea connected to the Atlantic Ocean, surrounded by the Mediterranean basin and almost completely enclosed by land: on the east by the Levant in West Asia, on the north by Anatolia in West Asia and Southern ...

region and in

Latin America Latin America is the cultural region of the Americas where Romance languages are predominantly spoken, primarily Spanish language, Spanish and Portuguese language, Portuguese. Latin America is defined according to cultural identity, not geogr ...

, where it has been called ''Leishmania chagasi''. It is also an unusual cause of cutaneous leishmaniasis, which is normally caused by specific lineages (or zymodemes). Wild

canid Canidae (; from Latin, ''canis'', "dog") is a family (biology), biological family of caniform carnivorans, constituting a clade. A member of this family is also called a canid (). The family includes three subfamily, subfamilies: the Caninae, a ...

s and domestic dogs are the

natural reservoir In Infection, infectious disease ecology and epidemiology, a natural reservoir, also known as a disease reservoir or a reservoir of infection, is the population of organisms or the specific environment in which an infectious pathogen naturally li ...

of this organism. The sandfly species '' Lutzomyia longipalpis'' serves as the primary vector for the transmission of the disease. ''Leishmania infantum'' is closely related to '' Leishmania donovani'', and some authors believe that these two species are so close as to actually be subspecies of each other; however,

phylogenetic analyses In biology, phylogenetics () is the study of the evolutionary history of life using observable characteristics of organisms (or genes), which is known as Computational phylogenetics, phylogenetic inference. It infers the relationship among organ ...

can easily distinguish between the two groups despite no difference in morphology in the

species complex In biology, a species complex is a group of closely related organisms that are so similar in appearance and other features that the boundaries between them are often unclear. The taxa in the complex may be able to hybridize readily with each oth ...

. Some isolates formerly labelled ''L. donovani'' may be actually ''L. infantum''.

Model system for studies of DNA repair

Comparative bioinformatic analyses showed that the size of the ''L. infantum''

BRCA2 ''BRCA2'' and BRCA2 () are human genes and their protein products, respectively. The official symbol (BRCA2, italic for the gene, nonitalic for the protein) and the official name (originally breast cancer 2; currently BRCA2, DNA repair associate ...

protein is approximately three times smaller (125 kD) than its human counterpart. Furthermore, analyses revealed that LiBRCA2 possesses key features of the BRCA2 family. The smaller size of the ''Leishmania'' BRCA2 DNA repair protein has been exploited to better understand its function in homologous recombination and its interaction with the LiRAD51 recombinase.

References

External links

* {{Taxonbar, from=Q1950789 Parasitic excavates Trypanosomatida Protists described in 1908 Euglenozoa species