An overview of the recent findings in the cultivation of Leishmania

Abstract

The cultivation of parasites of the genus Leishmania has been a subject of much interest due to the necessity of performing biochemical and immunological studies with isolated parasites in an effort to develop future therapeutic and preventive tools. Foetal calf serum (FCS) as the main part of Leishmania spp. cultivation media is highly expensive, and reliable supply of it is very difficult to obtain. Here, we take an overview of the new replacements for FCS in the cultivation process of Leishmania spp. and probability of optimizing them for parasites culture procedure. A precise review was conducted based on the database resources, and no restrictions were placed on date, design or language of publications and literature search was performed using Cochrane library, PubMed, Scopus, Google scholar and IranMedex. All considerable information about new replacements for FCS in the cultivation process of Leishmania parasites was searched, evaluated and discussed. The aim of this article was to introduce and discuss new replacements for FCS in the cultivation process of Leishmania parasites to give an overview about these candidates. According to this review, several novel replacements such as human and animal urine, animals’ milk, hydatid cyst fluid, chicken, sheep and lyophilized rabbit serum have been evaluated for cultivation of Leishmania spp., and efficiency of some of them were confirmed and established and resulted in new formulation of media. We could conclude that future research will be done to study about effective elements of those suitable replacements to find new commercial culture media.