Treatment of neurological disease has been impeded by limited drug diffusion across the blood-brain barrier. Convection-enhanced delivery is a drug administration method that can be used to treat diseases of the central nervous system by directly injecting a drug into a patient's brain and allowing the drug to circumvent the blood-brain barrier. However, the transport of a drug in a patient's brain following convection-enhanced delivery is often difficult to predict due to the brain's anisotropic properties, which differ according to direction of measurement.

Leishmania is a group of trypanosomatid protozoan parasites that exist in two morphological forms: a promastigote form within their insect vector and an amastigote form in the mammalian host. To study gene expression in these two distinct lifecycle forms, real-time quantitative PCR (RT-qPCR) experiments were used to determine the copy number of control gene transcripts in the two lifecycle form populations. The goal of the current study was to clone the β-tubulin gene from Leishmania donovani and evaluate its role as a reference control for RT-qPCR gene expression studies.