In an effort to unify the nomenclature of Trypanosoma cruzi, the causative agent of Chagas disease, an updated system was agreed upon at the Second Satellite Meeting. A consensus was reached that T. cruzi strains should be referred to by six discrete typing units (T. cruzi I-VI). The goal of a unified nomenclature is to improve communication within the scientific community involved in T. cruzi research. The justification and implications will be presented in a subsequent detailed report.

Human and animal fungal pathogens are a growing threat worldwide leading to emerging infections and creating new risks for established ones. There is a growing need for a rapid and accurate identification of pathogens to enable early diagnosis and targeted antifungal therapy. Morphological and biochemical identification methods are time-consuming and require trained experts. Alternatively, molecular methods, such as DNA barcoding, a powerful and easy tool for rapid monophasic identification, offer a practical approach for species identification and less demanding in terms of taxonomical expertise. However, its wide-spread use is still limited by a lack of quality-controlled reference databases and the evolving recognition and definition of new fungal species/complexes. An international consortium of medical mycology laboratories was formed aiming to establish a quality controlled ITS database under the umbrella of the ISHAM working group on “DNA barcoding of human and animal pathogenic fungi.” A new database, containing 2800 ITS sequences representing 421 fungal species, providing the medical community with a freely accessible tool at http://www.isham.org/ and http://its.mycologylab.org/ to rapidly and reliably identify most agents of mycoses, was established. The generated sequences included in the new database were used to evaluate the variation and overall utility of the ITS region for the identification of pathogenic fungi at intra-and interspecies level. The average intraspecies variation ranged from 0 to 2.25%. This highlighted selected pathogenic fungal species, such as the dermatophytes and emerging yeast, for which additional molecular methods/genetic markers are required for their reliable identification from clinical and veterinary specimens.

Proteasomes degrade most of the proteins inside eukaryotic cells, including transcription factors and regulators of cell cycle progression. Here we show that nanomolar concentrations of lactacystin, a specific irreversible inhibitor of the 20S proteasome, inhibit development of the exoerythrocytic and erythrocytic stages of the malaria parasite. Although lactacystin-treated Plasmodium berghei sporozoites are still invasive, their development into exoerythrocytic forms (EEF) is inhibited in vitro and in vivo. Erythrocytic schizogony of P. falciparum in vitro is also profoundly inhibited when drug treatment of the synchronized parasites is prior, but not subsequent, to the initiation of DNA synthesis, suggesting that the inhibitory effect of lactacystin is cell cycle specific. Lactacystin reduces P. berghei parasitemia in rats, but the therapeutic index is very low. Along with other studies showing that lactacystin inhibits stage-specific transformation in Trypanosoma and Entamoeba spp., these findings highlight the potential of proteasome inhibitors as drugs for the treatment of diseases caused by protozoan parasites.

Theoretical considerations predict that amplification of expressed gene transcripts by reverse transcription–PCR using arbitrarily chosen primers will result in the preferential amplification of the central portion of the transcript. Systematic, high-throughput sequencing of such products would result in an expressed sequence tag (EST) database consisting of central, generally coding regions of expressed genes. Such a database would add significant value to existing public EST databases, which consist mostly of sequences derived from the extremities of cDNAs, and facilitate the construction of contigs of transcript sequences. We tested our predictions, creating a database of 10,000 sequences from human breast tumors. The data confirmed the central distribution of the sequences, the significant normalization of the sequence population, the frequent extension of contigs composed of existing human ESTs, and the identification of a series of potentially important homologues of known genes. This approach should make a significant contribution to the early identification of important human genes, the deciphering of the draft human genome sequence currently being compiled, and the shotgun sequencing of the human transcriptome.