Plasmodium falciparum

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Classification

Higher order taxa

Kingdom: Protista Phylum: Apicomplexa Class: Aconoidasida Order: Haemosporida Family: Plasmadiidae

Species

Genus: Plasmodium Species: falciparum

Description and significance

Plasmodium falciparum lives in human red blood corpuscles. If one looks at a blood smear or blood film of a person infected with the malarial parasite, P. falciparum, they would probably see the immature trophozoites and gametophytes. The schizonts and the mature trophozoites are most likely not seen because they are imbedded in the tissues. The red blood cells that have been infected would be seen and they may contain more than one parasite. Faint comma-shaped red dots also appear on the surface of the erythrocytes and these are called the “Maurer’s dots”. They may cluster together in the form of a pear shape. After discovering the parasite, P. falciparum, researchers have attempted over the years to sequence its genome. The Malaria Genome Project was set up in the year 1995 to sequence its genome and in that same year its mitochondrion was sequenced. In 1996, the plastid (apicoplast) was sequenced. The genome of the nuclear chromosome 2 and chromosome 3 were sequenced in 1998 and 1999 respectively. And finally on October 3rd, 2002, the entire genome was sequenced. The Plasmodium falciparum genome is a difficult one to sequence because it is very complicated. Therefore, there were three institutions that divided the 14 chromosomes among themselves in the Malaria Genome Project. Stanford University sequenced chromosome 12, the Institute for Genomic Research and the Malaria Program of the Naval Medical Research Center worked on chromosomes 2, 10, 11 and 14 and the Sanger Centre sequenced chromosomes 1, 3-9, 13. The chromosome-by chromosome method was preferred instead of trying to sequence the entire genome by the shotgun method.

Genome structure

The Plasmodium falciparum genome is approximately 23 mega base pairs long. It consists of fourteen chromosomes with varying sizes from 0.643 to 3.29 mega base bairs long. The chromosomes are linear. The adenine to thymine composition is about 80.6% and about 90% in introns and intergenic areas. Fifty four percent of the genes contained introns and these genes were long about 2.3 kilo bases. In the genome, 5300 protein encoding genes were determined. That is about 1 gene for every 4338 base pairs. No transposable elements or retro-transposons were found. There were proteins on genes that were not recognized as well.

Cell structure and metabolism

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Ecology

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Pathology

How does this organism cause disease? Human, animal, plant hosts? Virulence factors, as well as patient symptoms.

Application to Biotechnology

Does this organism produce any useful compounds or enzymes? What are they and how are they used?

Current Research

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References

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Plasmodium_falciparum http://www.tigr.org/tdb/edb2/pfa1/htmls/ http://microbewiki.kenyon.edu/index.php/Plasmodium http://www.ispub.com/ostia/index.php?xmlFilePath=journals/ijmb/vol1n2/plasmodium.xml http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Malaria http://justice.loyola.edu/~klc/BL472/Malaria/research.html http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Plasmodium_falciparum_biology http://www.dhpe.org/infect/malaria.html