Hypoxanthine guanine phosphoribosyl transferases SmHGPRTases functional roles in .

Introduction: Extracellular/environmental stimuli trigger cellular responses to allow sp. parasites adaptation and decide development and survival fate. In this context, signal transduction involving eukaryotic protein kinases (ePKs) has an essential role in regulatory mechanisms.

Peptide Microarrays for Flavivirus Diagnosis.

Flavivirus are the most alarming prevalent viruses worldwide due to its vast impact on public health. Most early symptoms of diseases caused by Flavivirus are similar among each other and to other febrile illnesses making the clinical differential diagnosis challenging. In addition, due to cross-reactivity and a relatively limited persistence of viral RNA in infected individuals, the current available diagnosis strategies fail to efficiently provide a differential viral identification.

Docking-Based Virtual Screening Enables Prioritizing Protein Kinase Inhibitors With Phenotypic Activity Against Schistosoma mansoni.

Schistosomiasis is a parasitic neglected disease with praziquantel (PZQ) utilized as the main drug for treatment, despite its low effectiveness against early stages of the worm. To aid in the search for new drugs to tackle schistosomiasis, computer-aided drug design has been proved a helpful tool to enhance the search and initial identification of schistosomicidal compounds, allowing fast and cost-efficient progress in drug discovery. The combination of high-throughput data followed by phenotypic screening assays allows the assessment of a vast library of compounds with the potential to inhibit a single or even several biological targets in a more time- and cost-saving manner.

Use of BODIPY-Labeled ATP Analogues in the Development and Validation of a Fluorescence Polarization-Based Assay for Screening of Kinase Inhibitors.

The screening of compound libraries to identify small-molecule modulators of specific biological targets is crucial in the process for the discovery of novel therapeutics and molecular probes. Considering the need for simple single-tool assay technologies with which one could monitor "all" kinases, we developed a fluorescence polarization (FP)-based assay to monitor the binding capabilities of protein kinases to ATP. We used BODIPY ATP-y-S as a probe to measure the shift in the polarization of a light beam when passed through the sample.

Design and production of dengue virus chimeric proteins useful for developing tetravalent vaccines.

Dengue virus (DENV) is a Flavivirus estimated to cause 390 million infections/year. Currently, there is no anti-viral specific treatment for dengue, and efficient DENV vector control is still unfeasible. Here, we designed and produced chimeric proteins containing potential immunogenic epitopes from the four DENV serotypes in an attempt to further compose safer, balanced tetravalent dengue vaccines.

Viral immunogenicity determines epidemiological fitness in a cohort of DENV-1 infection in Brazil.

The dynamics of dengue virus (DENV) circulation depends on serotype, genotype and lineage replacement and turnover. In São José do Rio Preto, Brazil, we observed that the L6 lineage of DENV-1 (genotype V) remained the dominant circulating lineage even after the introduction of the L1 lineage. We investigated viral fitness and immunogenicity of the L1 and L6 lineages and which factors interfered with the dynamics of DENV epidemics.