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Adaptation

Malarial bet hedging

Nature Reviews Genetics volume 13, pages 298–299 (2012)Cite this article

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Like most parasites, P. falciparum is frequently required to adapt to changing conditions; however, the capacity of the transcriptome of this organism to respond to selection pressure remains controversial. To investigate this phenomenon, Rovira-Graells and colleagues compared global transcript levels in parasites within 21 clonal lines, which were sampled at seven time points in the asexual blood-stage cycle. Even though each line was isogenic and was grown in a homogenous environment, extensive transcriptional variation was observed within each clone across ~250 of the genes tested. Expression variation affected many gene families and functions, not only those related to immune evasion, suggesting that transcriptional variability is a common feature of this genome.

There was a large overlap in the genes that were variably expressed across lines, and quantitative PCR analysis showed that the expression pattern for most genes was stable within each parasite line.The authors identified the basis of this stable and heritable expression pattern: all but two of the 28 gene families showing variable expression were also epigenetically marked by histone H3 lysine 9 trimethylation (H3K9me3)-based heterochromatin.

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References

ORIGINAL RESEARCH PAPER

  1. Rovira-Graells, N. et al. Transcriptional variation in the malaria parasite Plasmodium falciparum. Genome Res. 13 March 2012 (doi:10.1101/gr.129692.111)

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FURTHER READING

  1. Volkman, A. K. et al. Harnessing genomics and genome biology to understand malaria biology. Nature Rev. Genet.Article

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Authors
  1. Tanita Casci
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Casci, T. Malarial bet hedging. Nat Rev Genet 13, 298–299 (2012). https://doi.org/10.1038/nrg3224

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