After many years of exhaustive research, Professor Alan Cowman and colleagues from the Walter And Eliza Hall Institute of Medical Research in Melbourne, Australia and the Howard Hughes Medical Institute identified previously unknown steps of how malaria parasites invade and remodel host erythrocytes. Their "systematic examination of remodeling proteins from the most deadly species of the malaria parasite, Plasmodium falciparum " may lead to new therapeutic strategies against the disease. Howard Hughes Medical Institute released the following statement: Malaria parasites go through a series of steps on their way to causing human disease. They travel from a mosquito bite on the skin to the liver, where they hunker down and multiply. They then fan out into the bloodstream, where they invade red blood cells both in an attempt to evade the immune system and to remodel them for their own use. “This is key to the parasite's survival in the host and the key to its pathogenesis,” Cowman said. To identify the role of each protein involved in red blood cell remodeling, the research team had to create a parasite without the gene that creates it. This modified parasite is called a knockout. While red blood cell rehabilitation requires a work crew of as many as 400 proteins, Cowman's team started their analysis with 200 of these, focusing on those that seemed unique or that had been linked to important roles before. This Cell paper describes t ...
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After many years of exhaustive research, Professor Alan Cowman and colleagues from the Walter And Eliza Hall Institute of Medical Research in Melbourne, Australia and the Howard Hughes Medical Institute identified previously unknown steps of how malaria parasites invade and remodel host erythrocytes. Their "systematic examination of remodeling proteins from the most deadly species of the malaria parasite, Plasmodium falciparum " may lead to new therapeutic strategies against the disease. Howard Hughes Medical Institute released the following statement: Malaria parasites go through a series of steps on their way to causing human disease. They travel from a mosquito bite on the skin to the liver, where they hunker down and multiply. They then fan out into the bloodstream, where they invade red blood cells both in an attempt to evade the immune system and to remodel them for their own use. “This is key to the parasite's survival in the host and the key to its pathogenesis,” Cowman said. To identify the role of each protein involved in red blood cell remodeling, the research team had to create a parasite without the gene that creates it. This modified parasite is called a knockout. While red blood cell rehabilitation requires a work crew of as many as 400 proteins, Cowman's team started their analysis with 200 of these, focusing on those that seemed unique or that had been linked to important roles before. This Cell paper describes t ...