Fig. 4

Standardization of qPCR assays for parasite load quantitation from skin lesions of golden hamsters infected with Leishmania (V.) braziliensis. Golden hamsters were infected with 10⁵ Leishmania (V.) braziliensis promastigotes, for 110 days. The panel shows representative amplification plots with the fluorescent signal magnitude for parasite kDNA and golden hamster GAPDH targets (a) and melting curve indicating the reaction specificity, observed through a single peak in each curve (b) Standard curves for parasite kDNA and golden hamster GAPDH targets indicate the dynamic extension, PCR efficiency and linearity coefficient of the reaction (c) To run the experiments, DNA and RNA were extracted from the same sample and qPCR assays were performed using SYBR Green fluorophore, as described in Methods section