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

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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 supernatants from either Trypanosoma brucei or Trypanosoma cruzi. Using HPLC, the L. donovani secretory invertase was isolated and subjected to amino acid sequencing. Subsequently, we used a molecular approach to identify the LdINV and LmexINV genes encoding the ~72 kDa invertases produced by these organisms. Interestingly, we identified high fidelity LdINV-like homologs in the genomes of all Leishmania sp. but none were present in either T. brucei or T. cruzi. Northern blot and RT-PCR analyses showed that these genes were developmentally/differentially expressed in promastigotes but not amastigotes of these parasites. Homologous transfection studies demonstrated that these genes in fact encoded the functional secretory invertases produced by these parasites. Cumulatively, our results suggest that these secretory enzymes play critical roles in the survival/growth/development and transmission of all Leishmania parasites within their sand fly vector hosts.

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Acknowledgments

This research was supported by the Intramural Research Program of the Division of Intramural Research, National Institute of Allergy and Infectious Diseases (NIAID), National Institutes of Health (NIH). Dr. Todd Lyda was supported by an Intramural Research Training Award Post-doctoral Fellowship from the NIAID, NIH. Dr. Manju Joshi was supported by an appointment through the Oak Ridge Institute for Science and Education (ORISE), Research Specialist Program at NIH. The program is administered by ORISE through an inter-agency agreement between the US Department of Energy and the NIH. Mr. Andrew Y. Kelada and Mr. Joshua P. Owings were supported by Postbaccalaureate Intramural Research Training Awards from the NIAID, NIH. We thank Dr. Greg Matlashewski, Department of Microbiology and Immunology McGill University, Montreal, CA for providing the pKSNEO leishmanial expression vector; Dr. Buddy Ullman, Department of Biochemistry and Molecular Biology, Oregon Health Sciences University, Portland, OR for providing the L. donovani cosmid library used in this study.

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Author notes

  1. Todd A. Lyda

    Present address: , 105 Collings Street BRC 216, Clemson, SC, 29634, USA

Authors and Affiliations

  1. Cell Biology Section, Laboratory of Parasitic Diseases, Division of Intramural Research, National Institute of Allergy and Infectious Diseases, National Institutes of Health, Bethesda, MD, 20892-0425, USA

    Manju B. Joshi, Andrew Y. Kelada, Joshua P. Owings & Dennis M. Dwyer

  2. Laboratory of Malaria and Vector Research, National Institute of Allergy and Infectious Diseases, National Institutes of Health, Rockville, MD, USA

    John F. Andersen

  3. Division of Biomedical and Life Sciences, Faculty of Health and Medicine, Lancaster University, Lancaster, LA1 4YQ, UK

    Paul A. Bates

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  1. Todd A. Lyda
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Correspondence to Todd A. Lyda.

Additional information

Todd A. Lyda and Manju B. Joshi have contributed equally to the research reported in this study.

The nucleotide sequences reported in this paper have been submitted to the GENEBANK™/EBI Databank with accession number (KJ866149 and KJ866150).

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Lyda, T.A., Joshi, M.B., Andersen, J.F. et al. A unique, highly conserved secretory invertase is differentially expressed by promastigote developmental forms of all species of the human pathogen, Leishmania . Mol Cell Biochem 404, 53–77 (2015). https://doi.org/10.1007/s11010-015-2366-6

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