Los seres humanos que desde niños son curiosos, con imaginación inquieta, observadores y sedientos por conocer el por qué de la certeza perfecta de la naturaleza, sensibles al arte, a la solidaridad humana, a las cosas sencillas del pueblo, con memoria sin vacilaciones y gran capacidad de amar, pocas veces pasan por la vida desapercibidos, especialmente si disfrutan de una vida larga y plena. Uno de ellos es el maestro José Vicente Scorza a quien conocí de niña como un profesor investigador héroe de la guerrilla urbana en Venezuela en los años sesenta y más tarde, como mi maestro en parasitología durante el doctorado. Comparto en esta breve semblanza algunos rasgos de su personalidad y logros, incluyendo los académicos, en el curso por su vida.

Those human beings that since childhood are curious with restless imagination, observant and thirsty for understanding the how’s and why’s of Nature’s perfect certainty; those who are sensible to the Arts, to human solidarity and watching for the common layman´s needs; with unhesitating memory and countless love to give, these human beings rarely pass through life unnoticed, especially if they enjoyed a long and full life. Maestro José Vicente Scorza was one of them. I have knew him since I was just a girl as the Research Professor, hero of Venezuelan Urban Guerrilla in the 1960’s and later, as my Professor in Parasitology during my Doctorate. I want to share with you a brief biography and some anecdotes about his personality and his achievements, including those academic ones, in his journey through life.

El seguimiento de las infecciones en triatominos es fundamental en la epidemiología de la enfermedad de Chagas. Demostramos la factibilidad de incorporar un nuevo diagnóstico molecular y detectar mediante LAMP, infecciones por T. cruzi y T. rangeli en muestras de contenido intestinal y hemolinfa preservadas en papel de filtro. La Amplificación Isotérmica mediada por asas (LAMP) es un nuevo método de amplificación de ácidos nucléicos que amplifica DNA con una alta especificidad, eficiencia y rapidez bajo condiciones isotérmicas, utilizando cuatro cebadores y DNA polime-rasa con actividad de cadena desplazante. Se ha aplicado un método que acelera la reacción LAMP mediante la utilización de cebadores aceleradores. El método LAMP utilizado en este trabajo produce una reacción en menos tiempo que el método original, esta reacción fue aplicada sobre muestras de Tripanosoma rangely y Tripanosoma cruzy. Regularmente el tiempo de detección es menor a una hora, este nuevo método nos facilita el análisis genético, incluyendo el diagnostico clínico genético en el laboratorio.

The monitoring of triatomino infections is a key step in the epidemiology of Chagas disease. We demonstrate the feasibility of incorporating new molecular identification tools, we obtained positive LAMP identification of infections by T. cruzi and T. rangeli in haemoliph and digestive track samples preserved in filter paper. Loop-mediated isothermal amplification (LAMP) is a novel nucleic acid amplification method thatamplifies DNA with high specificity, efficiency and rapidity under isothermal conditions using a set of four specially designed primers and a DNA polymerase with strand displacement activity. We have applied a method that accelerates the LAMP reaction by using additional primers, termed loop primers. The LAMP method presented here uses loop primers to achieve reaction times of less than half that of the original LAMP method, this reaction was applied to samples from Tripanosoma rangely and Tripanosoma cruzy. Since the total time of analysis including detection is less than 1 h, this new method should facilitate genetic analysis, including genetic diagnosis in the clinical laboratory

Here we review the phenomenon of persistency in Leishmania (Viannia) braziliensis infections. In other Leishmania species where appropriate animal models exist, considerable advances in the understanding of basic immunologic mechanisms of persistency have been made; for a review see Aebisher (1994). On the contrary, the evidences of persistence in infections with L. braziliensis rest on studies of human clinical cases many of which we summarized and discussed in this work

A study od Typanosomatidae GC distribution and codon usage is presented. The codon usage patterns in coincidence with the phylogenetical data are similar in Crithidia and Leishmania, whereas they are more divergent in Trypanosoma brucei and T. cruzi. The analyisis of the GC mutational pressure in these organisms reveals that T. brucei, and to a lesser extent T. cruzi, have envolved towards a more balanced use of all bases, whereas Leishmania and Crithidia retain features of a primeval genetic apparatus. Tables with approximated GC mutational pressure in homologous genes, and codon usage in Trypanosomatidae are presented.