"Application of molecular genetics for diagnosis of neurocysticercosis and genes discovery in Taenia solium"

by de Almeida, Carolina Rodrigues

Neurocysticercosis is a frequent parasitic infection of the central nervous system, mainly in developing countries. High costs of magnetic resonance images (nowadays the most accurate method of diagnosis) may be prohibitive in these regions and the interpretation of the multiple immunologic tests available is often difficult. We demonstrate in this work that Taenia solium DNA is present in the cerebrospinal fluid (CSF) of patients and enabled the correct diagnosis of 29/30 patients (96.7 %) with 100\% specificity through the PCR methodology. The presence of parasite DNA in the CSF of patients may have important consequences over the diagnosis of this important disease. Besides, we enlarge significant the knowledge about Taenia´s transcriptome producing the first 2880 ESTs (Expressed Sequence Tags) of Taenia solium cysticerci. We were able to found at least seven new important genes that may be a important role in a battle against neurocysticercosis because through them it is possible identify considerable aspects of this disease, even though establishing other and efficient strategies of prevention, founding new antigens to improve the immunodiagnosis or building a vaccine to protect the hosts that carry on this important parasite.