Gene/Protein Disease Symptom Drug Enzyme Compound
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Query: UMLS:C0024530 (malaria)
 44,886 document(s) hit in 31,850,051 MEDLINE articles (0.00 seconds)

Ammonia, lactate and glutamate levels and the activities of glutamine synthetase (GS), glutamate dehydrogenase (GDH), glutaminase (GLN), aspartate transaminase (AST), phosphofructokinase (PFK) and monoamine oxidase (MAO) were compared in the brain tissue of normal and P. yoelii infected mice. The brain lactate increased by 96% at peak parasitaemia. Cerebral ammonia also exhibited an increase in infected mice which was parasitaemia dependent, while glutamate remained almost unchanged. The brain glutamine synthetase registered an increase of 35% (P < 0.001) in post-mitochondrial fractions, this effect being perceptible even at low parasitaemia, but attained constancy at parasitaemia levels higher than 20%. The activity of monoamine oxidase and phosphofructokinase increased by 105% (P < 0.02) and 41% (P < 0.05) respectively while glutamate dehydrogenase decreased by 15% (P < 0.001). Glutaminase and aspartate transaminase were not significantly influenced by infection (tested only at high parasitaemia levels). It has been postulated that cerebral hypoxia and aberrations in ammonia metabolism may both contribute towards malaria induced cerebral complications.
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PMID:Cerebral ammonia levels and enzyme changes during Plasmodium yoelii infection in mice. 136 Oct 9

Molecular studies of insect disease vectors are of paramount importance for understanding parasite-vector relationship. Advances in this area have led to important findings regarding changes in vectors' physiology upon blood feeding and parasite infection. Mechanisms for interfering with the vectorial capacity of insects responsible for the transmission of diseases such as malaria, Chagas disease and dengue fever are being devised with the ultimate goal of developing transgenic insects. A primary necessity for this goal is information on gene expression and control in the target insect. Our group is investigating molecular aspects of the interaction between Leishmania parasites and Lutzomyia sand flies. As an initial step in our studies we have used random sequencing of cDNA clones from two expression libraries made from head/thorax and abdomen of sugar fed L. longipalpis for the identification of expressed sequence tags (EST). We applied differential display reverse transcriptase-PCR and randomly amplified polymorphic DNA-PCR to characterize differentially expressed mRNA from sugar and blood fed insects, and, in one case, from a L. (V.) braziliensis-infected L. longipalpis. We identified 37 cDNAs that have shown homology to known sequences from GeneBank. Of these, 32 cDNAs code for constitutive proteins such as zinc finger protein, glutamine synthetase, G binding protein, ubiquitin conjugating enzyme. Three are putative differentially expressed cDNAs from blood fed and Leishmania-infected midgut, a chitinase, a V-ATPase and a MAP kinase. Finally, two sequences are homologous to Drosophila melanogaster gene products recently discovered through the Drosophila genome initiative.
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PMID:Characterization of constitutive and putative differentially expressed mRNAs by means of expressed sequence tags, differential display reverse transcriptase-PCR and randomly amplified polymorphic DNA-PCR from the sand fly vector Lutzomyia longipalpis. 1128 81