The Leishmania HSP20 Is Antigenic during Natural Infections, but, as DNA Vaccine, It does not Protect BALB/c Mice against Experimental L. amazonensis Infection

Figure 1

Amino acid sequence alignment of HSP20 from Leishmania spp. and S. cerevisiae HSP26. Protein sequences of L. amazonensis (LaHSP20, this work; EMBL accession number AM712297), L. infantum (LiHSP20, GeneDB identifier LinJ29_v3.2560), L. major (LmjHSP20, GeneDB identifier LmjF29.2450), L. braziliensis (LbHSP20, GeneDB identifier LbrM29_V2.2420) sHSPs, and S. cerevisiae HSP26 (UniProtKB/Swiss-Prot entry P15992) were aligned using the default settings of ClustalW (DNAstar program). Amino acid residues conserved in all sequences are shaded; those conserved in more than 50% of the sequences are boxed. The position of the α-crystallin domain is indicated by a horizontal line. The domains were defined using the Prosite utility at the ExPASy Proteomics Server (http://www.expasy.org); high scores with the HSP20/α-crystallin family profile (accession number PS01031) were obtained.