Transcriptional profiling of the in vivo intraerythrocytic development cycle of Plasmodium falciparum

• Main Author: Fann, Rui Yang
• Other Authors: School of Biological Sciences
• Format: Final Year Project
• Language: English
• Published: 2009
• Subjects: DRNTU::Science::Biological sciences::Genetics
• Online Access: http://hdl.handle.net/10356/16295
• Institution: Nanyang Technological University

Malaria is one of the most common and widespread infectious diseases which causes over a million deaths every year. Plasmodium falciparum alone is responsible for the majority of human malaria. The completion of P. falciparum genome project in 2002 has paved the paths for further intensive research and full characterization of the parasite. Microarray technology has been used for genome-wide analyses of P. falciparum’s transcriptome during the asexual intraerythrocyte development cycle (IDC) to elucidate the complex transcriptional regulations and the functional roles of proteins. Here, we present transcription profiling of patient samples obtained from Kilifi, Kenya. Initial analyses showed that the patient samples had asynchronous time points. The well characterized P. falciparum HB3 strain was thus used as the reference transcriptional profile in our study in order to elucidate the differential expressed genes between the transcription profile of patient samples and of the HB3 strain. In our projects, groups of differentially-expressed genes were observed. A significant number of these genes are involved in coding protein responsible for invasion, drug resistance, immune evasion as well as those act as membrane proteins and asexual stage surface antigen. These differentially expressed genes are potentially the causative factors to a wide spectrum of malarial disease manifestations.