“…Nucleic acid detection techniques in samples from people and/or animals infected with Leishmania, such as PCR, are used for detection and identi cation of the parasite since the 1980's. PCR include ampli cation of fragments of the gene encoding the small ribosomal RNA subunit (SSU rDNA,(van Eys et al, 1992), the transcribed internal ribosomal DNA spacer (ITS) (Schonian et al, 2003), sequences corresponding to kinetoplast (kDNA) (Cortes et al, 2004), mini-exon (Paiva et al, 2004), the gene encoding the heat shock protein HSP70, among others (da Silva et al, 2010). In spite of the high sensitivity of PCR and, depending on the molecular target, high speci city, it is more used in epidemiological studies than as a routine diagnostic method, and the gold standard method to diagnose Leishmania is the observation of the parasite by microscopic analysis (Thakur, Joshi, and Kaur, 2020).…”