Search

Key Clinical Message Head lice (Pediculus humanus capitis) infestation is an important disease worldwide, especially in children under 11 years old. Permethrin is the most common insecticide for treatment of human pediculosis, but nowadays resistance to permethrin and other pyrethroids has caused many treatment failures. The second treatment of choice is malathion.

Plasmodium vivax, an intracellular protozoan, causes malaria which is characterized by fever, anemia, respiratory distress, liver and spleen enlargement. In spite of attempts to design an efficient vaccine, there is not a vaccine against P. vivax. Notable advances have recently achieved in the development of malaria vaccines targeting the surface antigens such as Apical Membrane Antigens (AMA)-1. AMA-1 is a micronemal protein synthesized during the erythrocyte-stage of Plasmodium species and plays a significant role in the invasion process of the parasite into host cells. P. vivax AMA-1 (PvAMA-1) can induce strong cellular and humoral responses, indicating that it can be an ideal candidate of vaccine against malaria. Identification and prediction of proteins characteristics increase our knowledge about them and leads to develop vaccine and diagnostic studies. In the present study several valid bioinformatics tools were applied to analyze the various characteristics of AMA-1 such as physical and chemical properties, secondary and tertiary structures, B- cell and T-cell prediction and other important features in order to introduce potential epitopes for designing a high-efficient vaccine. The results demonstrated that this protein had 57 potential PTM sites and only one transmembrane domain on its sequence. Also, multiple hydrophilic regions and classical high hydrophilic domains were predicted. Secondary structure prediction revealed that the proportions of random coil, alpha-helix and extended strand in the AMA-1 sequence were 53.74%, 27.22%, and 19.4%, respectively. Moreover, 5 disulfide bonds were predicted at positions 14–21aa, 162–192aa, 208–220aa, 247–265aa and 354–363aa. The data obtained from B-cell and T-cell epitopes prediction showed that there were several potential epitopes on AMA-1 that can be proper targets for diagnostic and vaccine studies. The current study presented interesting basic and theoretical information regarding PvAMA-1, being important for further studies in order to design a high-efficiency vaccine against malaria.

Echinococcosis is one of the most important parasitic zoonotic diseases in the world. The life cycle of Echinococcus granulosus is dependent to the dog–sheep cycle and is actively transmitted in all pastoral regions where sheep, cattle and camels predominate. DNA approaches are now being used routinely for accurate identification of Echinococcus and Taenia species, subspecies and strains. In this study, faecal samples were collected from 50 stray dogs from Mashhad city in the northeast of Iran during June 2011. All samples were frozen at least for 1 week in −80°C. The embryophore layer of the eggs was broken by freezing–thawing method after egg concentration by the formalin-ether method. DNA was extracted using a DNA isolation kit (MBST, Germany/Iran) according to the manufacturer’s instructions. After PCR, by the primers expressed in the following it became, clear that about 20 % of stray dogs are infected with E. granulosus. In this study, we describe a modified method for DNA isolation from faeces for coprodiagnosis of Echinococcus spp.