Assessment of the infectivity potential of Leishmania infantum, using flow cytometry

The protozoan parasite Leishmania infantum causes leishmaniases, a sandfly-borne disease of humans and dogs, in all countries of the Mediterranean basin. The promastigote, infective stage of the parasite, once inoculated to the mammalian host by the vector, is ingested by macrophages. Leishmania lives within the lysosome of the phagocytic immune cells inactivating the enzymes contained. The ability of an isolate to survive within the macrophage and its rate of multiplication in this environment is an important factor determining the infectivity potential of the isolate and the manifestation of the disease. This capacity of the parasite is measured as the percentage of infected cells and the mean value of parasites per cell. The infectivity potential, of clinical isolates of L. infantum infecting THP-1 cells in vitro, was studied by flow cytometry and light microscopy. The percentages of cells in a sample containing a specific number of parasites, as recorded by light microscopy, were used in flow cytometry to manually gate the mean fluorescence intensity which corresponded to the percentage of cells with that number of parasites. The gating obtained, was then used as a "standard reference curve" to evaluate results by flow cytometry compared to those obtained by light microscopy. The results, of the overall percentage of infected cells and the number of parasites per cell in the culture, matched in the two methods. So, flow cytometry can be used as a rapid, cost effective, easy and reproducible method to study the infectivity potential of isolates, either in biological, epidemiological, or clinical tests, particularly for the assessment of drug efficiency trials.