Cellular and molecular aspects of clag 9

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Malaria is a very important disease worldwide, causing hundreds of millions of cases and about two million deaths per year. Severe malaria including cerebral malaria is a major cause of death. It is caused by red blood cells which contain malaria parasites sticking to the lining of microscopic veins and clogging them; what happens after this is complex. The process of sticking is called cytoadherence. We have discovered a gene which is important in this process of sticking. We have called it by the acronym clag, for cytoadherence-linked asexual gene; most Australians know of Clag as a glue. Our evidence for this has been accepted for publication by the prestigious USA journal Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences of the USA. Recent work overseas aimed at determining the entire DNA sequence of the malaria parasite has shown that clag is not alone; there are at least 9 slightly different clag genes in the malaria parasite. What do the others do? We propose two possibilities. The first is that all of them act in cytoadherence but that different clags enable the parasitised cells to stick to different things on the lining of veins. The second is that they enable the parasitised cells, or perhaps the parasites alone, to stick to other things at different stages of the complex life cycle of the parasite. The experiments that we propose should show whether either of these proposals is true.