Bioluminescent Imaging Identifies Thymus, As Overlooked Colonized Organ, in a Chronic Model of Leishmania donovani Mouse Visceral Leishmaniasis
[EN] The search for new drugs against neglected parasitic diseases has experienced a major boost in recent years with the incorporation of bioimaging techniques. Visceral leishmaniasis, the second more neglected disease in the world, has effective treatments but with several disadvantages that make...
| Authors: | , , , , , |
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| Format: | article |
| Status: | Versión enviada para evaluación y publicación |
| Publication Date: | 2021 |
| Country: | España |
| Institution: | Universidad Rey Juan Carlos |
| Repository: | BULERIA. Repositorio Institucional de la Universidad de León |
| OAI Identifier: | oai:buleria.unileon.es:10612/17832 |
| Online Access: | https://pubs.acs.org/doi/10.1021/acsinfecdis.0c00864 https://hdl.handle.net/10612/17832 |
| Access Level: | Open access |
| Keyword: | Medicina. Salud Leishmania donovani Drug discovery In vivo imaging Thymus 32 Ciencias Médicas 3109 Ciencias Veterinarias 3214 Toxicología |
| Summary: | [EN] The search for new drugs against neglected parasitic diseases has experienced a major boost in recent years with the incorporation of bioimaging techniques. Visceral leishmaniasis, the second more neglected disease in the world, has effective treatments but with several disadvantages that make the search for new therapeutic solutions an urgent task. Animal models of visceral leishmaniasis that resemble the human disease have the disadvantage of using hamsters, which are an outbred breeding animal too large to obtain acceptable images with current bioimaging methodologies. Mouse models of visceral leishmaniasis seem, however, to be more suitable for early (acute) stages of the disease, but not for chronic ones. In our work, we describe a chronic Balb/c mouse model in which the infection primarily colonizes the spleen and well recreates the late stages of human disease. Thanks to the bioluminescent image, we have been able to identify experimentally, for the first time, a new primary lymphoid organ of colonization, the thymus, which appears infected from the beginning until the late phases of the infection. |
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