A COMPARATIVE STUDY OF THE DEVELOPMENT OF LEISHMANIA PARASITES IN DIFFERENT NUTRIENT ENVIRONMENTS

Leishmaniasis is a serious parasitic disease prevalent in the Middle East and Mediterranean countries. In vitro culture of parasites is of particular importance for preparing a vaccine against the disease and studying the sensitivity of the causative agent to drugs. A wide spectrum of methods is available for the cultivation of Leishmania in both biphasic and liquid media. Biphasic media are suitable for primary isolation of parasites and for achieving high infectivity of promastigotes, while liquid media are more suitable for large-scale experiments. In different studies, Leishmania parasites were cultured in different nutrient media. As a result of the research, optimization of the cultivation of Leishmania promastigotes in biphasic SNB-9 (saline-neopeptone-blood) medium, which combines the advantages of biphasic and liquid medium, originally prepared for trypanosomes, was proposed. In other studies, a novel blood-free biphasic nutrient medium with hemoglobin was prepared for the cultivation of L.donovani promastigotes. Also simple agar, nutrient broth, medium consisting of 10% fetal bovine serum; new nutrient medium consisting of simple ingredients that can provide promastigote culture with high viability has been proposed. All these studies are very important from the point of view of preparing new mediums that are easier to use and alternative to the classical nutrient medium used in the cultivation of Leishmania parasites in the future.