Identificación de especies de Leishmania por la técnica de amplificación al azar del ADN polimórfico

introduction: leishmaniosis has been regarded by the world health organization as one of the most important tropical diseases. it is very difficult to control such parasitosis because there are not vaccines, and therapy is generally toxic and unsatisfactory. it is of vital importance to set prompt diagnostic method along with identification of the parasite in order to select the suitable treatment and to design the most convenient control measures. recently, the advances in molecular biology have made it possible to characterize leishmania species by different methods. the random amplified polymorphic dna technique is a simple method to detect the genetic polymorphic dna. objective: to standardize the random amplified polymorphic dna technique for its use in new world leishmania species typing. methods: by using 5 pmol primer concentration, 75 ng of template dna, 2 mm of magnesium chloride and 2 u of polymerase dna taq in 25μl reaction, two reproducible amplification patters were obtained. the optimized random amplified polymorphic dna technique served to determine the genetic differences among ten reference strains of leishmania, with 6 sets of randomly designed conventional primers. the up gma method-based grouping strategy determined the phylogenetic relation among the studied species. results: opa primers -3, 4 and 8 allowed distinguishing the ten reference strains of leishmania under study. two well defined genetic groups including species of leishmania and viannia subgenres were obtained; these 2 subgenres showed genetic differences. conclusions: in this way, our laboratory has the optimized random amplified polymorphic dna for the identification of leishmania species.