ArticlePLoS pathogens2015
Characterization of metabolically quiescent Leishmania parasites in murine lesions using heavy water labeling.
Article in PLoS pathogens, 2015. The graph could read no effect estimate from its abstract, so it casts no vote on the map. Cited by 69 papers.
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Who cites it
69 citing papers in PubMed, 142 citations in OpenAlex.
- Bi-directional highways and super-seeder tissues underpin parasite dissemination in experimental Leishmania donovani infection.Nature communications · 2026Article
- Five-layer systems analysis ofeLife · 2026Article
- Multi-drug tolerance in Leishmania persister-like cells.Communications biology · 2026Article
- Leishmania major virulence attenuation in vitro: An old conundrum revisited in the omics era.PLoS neglected tropical diseases · 2026Article
- Dissecting apicoplast functions through continuous cultivation of Toxoplasma gondii devoid of the organelle.Nature communications · 2025Article
- TransLeish: Identification of membrane transporters essential for survival of intracellular Leishmania parasites in a systematic gene deletion screen.Nature communications · 2025Article
- Metabolomic and proteomic applications to exercise biomedicine.Translational exercise biomedicine · 2024Review
- Long-term hematopoietic stem cells trigger quiescence in Leishmania parasites.PLoS pathogens · 2024Article
- Vector-borne Trypanosoma brucei parasites develop in artificial human skin and persist as skin tissue forms.Nature communications · 2023Article
- The adaptive roles of aneuploidy and polyclonality in Leishmania in response to environmental stress.EMBO reports · 2023Article
- Metabolomics analysis of visceral leishmaniasis based on urine of golden hamsters.Parasites & vectors · 2023Article
- Unveiling drug-tolerant and persister-like cells inFrontiers in cellular and infection microbiology · 2023Article
- Absence of DEATH kinesin is fatal for Leishmania mexicana amastigotes.Scientific reports · 2022Article
- Transcriptional Shift and Metabolic Adaptations duringMicroorganisms · 2022Article
- Finding Correlations Between mRNA and Protein Levels inFrontiers in cellular and infection microbiology · 2022Review
- Nitric oxide controls proliferation of Leishmania major by inhibiting the recruitment of permissive host cells.Immunity · 2021Article
- Lipid and fatty acid metabolism in trypanosomatids.Microbial cell (Graz, Austria) · 2021Review
- Metabolic flexibility in Trypanosoma cruzi amastigotes: implications for persistence and drug sensitivity.Current opinion in microbiology · 2021Review
- Redesigned and reversed: architectural and functional oddities of the trypanosomal ATP synthase.Parasitology · 2021Review
- Life Cycle Stage-Specific Accessibility of Leishmania donovani Chromatin at Transcription Start Regions.mSystems · 2021Article
9 more citing papers are in PubMed but not listed here.
Corrections and comments
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Authors and funding
5 authors at 1 institution in 1 country.
Funding
No grant is acknowledged in the PubMed record.
Abstract
Information on the growth rate and metabolism of microbial pathogens that cause long-term chronic infections is limited, reflecting the absence of suitable tools for measuring these parameters in vivo. Here, we have measured the replication and physiological state of Leishmania mexicana parasites in murine inflammatory lesions using 2H2O labeling. Infected BALB/c mice were labeled with 2H2O for up to 4 months, and the turnover of parasite DNA, RNA, protein and membrane lipids estimated from the rate of deuterium enrichment in constituent pentose sugars, amino acids, and fatty acids, respectively. We show that the replication rate of parasite stages in these tissues is very slow (doubling time of ~12 days), but remarkably constant throughout lesion development. Lesion parasites also exhibit markedly lower rates of RNA synthesis, protein turnover and membrane lipid synthesis than parasite stages isolated from ex vivo infected macrophages or cultured in vitro, suggesting that formation of lesions induces parasites to enter a semi-quiescent physiological state. Significantly, the determined parasite growth rate accounts for the overall increase in parasite burden indicating that parasite death and turnover of infected host cells in these lesions is minimal. We propose that the Leishmania response to lesion formation is an important adaptive strategy that minimizes macrophage activation, providing a permissive environment that supports progressive expansion of parasite burden. This labeling approach can be used to measure the dynamics of other host-microbe interactions in situ.
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Read under generation 80e0d062 · epoch 390. Bibliography from PubMed, PubMed Central and OpenAlex; grants from NIH RePORTER; trial links from ClinicalTrials.gov; estimates, votes and beliefs from the OpenQuestion graph.