Protozoan parasites, including the apicomplexan pathogens Plasmodium falciparum (which causes malaria) and Toxoplasma gondii (which causes toxoplasmosis), infect millions of people worldwide and represent major human disease burdens.
The results confirm that mosquito-leaving behaviour is energy-state dependent, and provide some of the first evidence of state-dependent domicile emigration in An. gambiae, which may play a role in malarial transmission dynamics.
Artemisinin and its derivatives (ARTs) are frontline antimalarial drugs.
Serine hydroxymethyltransferase (SHMT), an essential enzyme for cell growth and development, catalyzes the transfer of -CH2OH from l-serine to tetrahydrofolate (THF) to form glycine and 5,10-methylenetetrahydrofolate (MTHF) which is used for nucleotide synthesis.
This protocol describes the large-scale evaluation of a novel vector control product, designed to overcome some of the known limitations of existing methods.
We found that AMA1 was a major target of naturally acquired invasion-inhibitory antibodies that were highly prevalent in malaria-endemic populations and showed a high degree of allele specificity. Significantly, the prevalence of inhibitory antibodies to different alleles varied substantially within populations and between geographic locations.
In 2012, the World Health Organization recommended the addition of single low-dose primaquine (SLDPQ, 0.25 mg base/kg body weight) to artemisinin combination therapies to block the transmission of Plasmodium falciparum without testing for glucose-6-phosphate dehydrogenase deficiency.
Plasmodium falciparum mature gametocytes can survive up to 16–32 days (at least 14 days for mature male gametocytes) in vitro in absence of the influence of host factors.
This study is the first report of phenotypic difference between PkDBPαII haplotypes.
The apicomplexan parasite Plasmodium falciparum is responsible for global malaria burden. With the reported resistance to artemisinin chemotherapy, there is an urgent need to maintain early phase drug discovery and identify novel drug targets for successful eradication of the pathogen from the host.
