Frequently Asked Questions

A: Leishmaniasis is a parasitic protozoan disease, responsible for non-resolving and chronic infection, affecting over 10 million people worldwide, with ongoing environmental changes are considered to be helping the disease to spread to new regions. Leishmania pathogenesis is poorly understood and to combat the infection and to control the disease further insights into host-pathogen interaction are desperately needed. An integral part of the constant arms race between the host immune system and pathogens is the rapid appearance of pathogenic Short Linear Motifs (SLiMs), capable of modulating the host cell regulation. The limited sequence length of these protein-binding segments provides advantages for the pathogen, as SLiMs can arise de novo and many can be packed into a single protein. Their properties make them hard to identify at a large scale using biochemical methods alone, however, using bioinformatics approaches this process can be accelerated.