Proteomics in leptospirosis research: towards molecular diagnostics and vaccine development

Leptospirosis is a bacterial zoonotic disease that remains a public health problem worldwide. Unfortunately, the current gold standard test used for the serological diagnosis of leptospirosis has some drawbacks and there is no vaccine available for successful prevention of leptospirosis in humans. Therefore, recent research on leptospirosis has focused mainly on identifying leptospiral immunogens to be used for diagnostics and vaccine development. This review provides a brief summary of recent proteomic studies applied to leptospirosis. These studies were conducted with two major aims: to characterize outer membrane proteins using a classical proteomics approach and to identify potential leptospiral immunogens using an immunoproteomics approach. The results obtained from these studies may lead to the development of earlier and more accurate diagnostic test(s) and vaccine discovery.