The differentiation of Leishmania parasites from the insect stage, the promastigote, toward the pathogenic mammalian stage, the amastigote, is triggered primarily by the rise in ambient temperature encountered during the insect-to-mammal transmission. We show here that inactivation of heat shock protein (Hsp) 90, with the use of the drugs geldanamycin or radicicol, mimics transmission and induces the differentiation from the promastigote to the amastigote stage. Geldanamycin also induces a growth arrest of cultured promastigotes that can be forestalled by overexpression of the cytoplasmic Hsp90. Moreover, we demonstrate that Hsp90 serves as a feedback inhibitor of the cellular heat shock response in Leishmania. Our results are consistent with Hsp90 homeostasis serving as cellular thermometer for these primitive eukaryotes, controlling both the heat shock response and morphological differentiation.
INTRODUCTIONProtozoan parasites of the genus Leishmania are transmitted by blood-feeding sand flies to mammalian hosts, including humans, whereby they encounter a rise in ambient temperature. Subjecting cultured insect stages, the promastigotes, of various Leishmania species to a similar temperature upshift in vitro results in the transient posttranscriptional upregulation of both heat shock protein (Hsp) 90 (also known as Hsp83) and Hsp70 synthesis and a persistent induction of Hsp100 expression Brandau et al., 1995;Krobitsch et al., 1998). Moreover, species such as L. mexicana, L. pifanoi, and L. donovani will, during heat stress and acidification of the medium, show a morphological transition toward the mammalian stage, the amastigote (Zilberstein and Shapira, 1994;Saar et al., 1998). Such axenic amastigotes are indistinguishable from true host tissue-derived intracellular amastigotes (Bates, 1993;Pan et al., 1993;Charest and Matlashewski, 1994;Charest et al., 1996;Gupta et al., 1996;Saar et al., 1998). Thus, the rise of temperature encountered during transmission can be viewed not as stress but rather as signal for cellular differentiation.We have shown previously that Hsp100 is critical for the expression of some amastigote stage-specific proteins and for overall virulence of the parasites (Hubel et al., 1997;Krobitsch et al., 1998); however, gene replacement mutants lacking Hsp100 still show, induced by elevated temperature, morphological differentiation to viable amastigote-like culture stages, indicating that the induction of morphological differentiation occurs independently or upstream of Hsp100 (Krobitsch et al., 1998;Krobitsch and Clos, 1999).Another chaperone, Hsp90 (Hsp83), is one of the most abundant proteins in Leishmania, constituting 2.8% of the cellular protein . Hsp90 (Hsp83) is encoded by multiple gene copies and is found in the soluble fraction of the cytoplasm (Shapira and Pinelli, 1989;Brandau et al., 1995;Hubel and Clos, 1996). Its sequence is distinct from the Grp94 homologue of L. infantum, which was characterized recently (Larreta et al., 2000). In higher eukaryotes and in yeast, cytosolic H...