This is an open access article distributed under the terms of the Creative Commons Attribution License, which permits unrestricted use, distribution, and reproduction in any medium, provided the original author and source are credited.įunding: JLSN was supported by the National Institutes of Health (NIH) National Center for Advancing Translational Sciences (NCATS) award number UH2 TR001369 and National Institute of Allergy and Infectious Diseases (NIAID) award number 1R21AI127505 AD was supported by the National Institutes of Health, Grant no. PLoS Negl Trop Dis 12(8):Įditor: Photini Sinnis, Johns Hopkins Bloomberg School of Public Health, UNITED STATESĬopyright: © 2018 Siqueira-Neto et al. (2018) Cysteine proteases in protozoan parasites. CPs from these organisms and from other protozoan parasites should be further characterized to improve our understanding of their biological functions and identify novel targets for chemotherapy.Ĭitation: Siqueira-Neto JL, Debnath A, McCall L-I, Bernatchez JA, Ndao M, Reed SL, et al. A number of candidate inhibitors are under development. cruzi, and Plasmodium sp.) are well characterized as druggable targets based on in vitro and in vivo models. Clan CA proteases from three organisms ( T. cruzi, Cryptosporidium sp., Plasmodium sp., and Toxoplasma gondii. This review highlights current knowledge on clan CA cysteine proteases, the best-characterized group of cysteine proteases, from 7 protozoan organisms causing human diseases with significant impact: Entamoeba histolytica, Leishmania species (sp.), Trypanosoma brucei, T.

Cysteine proteases (CPs) play key roles in the pathogenesis of protozoan parasites, including cell/tissue penetration, hydrolysis of host or parasite proteins, autophagy, and evasion or modulation of the host immune response, making them attractive chemotherapeutic and vaccine targets.

Dog Days by P.J. Reed