Quantitative proteomics of infected macrophages reveals novel Leishmania virulence factors

Leishmaniasis is a major public health problem, causing diseases ranging from self-healing skin lesions to life-threatening chronic infections. Understanding how Leishmania parasites evade the host defense system is crucial for understanding the different manifestations of the disease and for improving diagnostic tools and drug development. We performed high-resolution proteome profiling of Leishmania spp. across three species during macrophage infection and identified distinct temporal expression patterns. Clustering analysis revealed unique protein expression profiles for each Leishmania species, whereas pairwise enrichment analysis revealed specific up- and downregulation patterns at different infection stages. Our results confirmed known virulence factors and highlighted new ones, demonstrating the utility of our dataset. We validated the dataset by showing that deletion of putative L. mexicana virulence factors resulted in reduced stage differentiation capacity and infectivity. This novel Leishmania infectome database (LInfDB) is available online for further exploration (https://butterlab.imb-mainz.de/LInfDB), providing a valuable resource for future research.