Malaria Parasite Sexual Development, Drug Resistance, an

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The Malaria Genomic Unit uses the malaria parasite genome databases and develops new resources to study the mechanism of drug resistance, gene regulation during parasite sexual development, and parasite population diversity and evolution. Now we have finished collecting single nucleotide polymorphisms (SNPs) from 3539 genes on all of the 14 chromosomes of Plasmodium falciparum. We are developing a platform that will allow us to genotype large number of SNPs. All the SNP information and some DNA have been sent a company; and we are in the process of evaluating a SNP typing chip. A manuscript describing this multi-year project is being submitted. We have finished the project studying chromosomal haplotypes, population structures, and recombination rate variation and have published a paper in PLoS Biology. The project studying the origin of P. vivax parasite has been completed too. We sequenced the mitochondrial genome from 176 P. vivax isolates and 5 other primate malaria species. Our data support the hypothesis of host switches and origin of P. vivax from Asian monkeys. The results were published in Mol. Biol. Evol. Another major effort of our laboratory is to study gene expression and regulation associated with the parasite sexual differentiation. We have identified a gene that may play a key role in gametocyte development using microarray and genetic mapping. The results from this study have also been published in PNAS. We are in the process of growing parasite isolates for genotyping using the SNP typing technology we are developing and a high density Affymatrix tiling array. We hope to use these methods and field parasites to locate loci that are associated with different drug resistant and parasite development phenotypes. We are still interested in various aspects of parasite sexual development, particularly the biological functions of Pfmdv1 and other genes that may involve in the process of gametocyte development.