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Malaria A blueprint of ‘bad air’

Nature volume 400, pages 506–507 (1999)Cite this article

The ‘bad air’ agent — mal aria in Italian — was fancied to be the cause of malaria far into the nineteenth century. At that time, Ross and Grassi discovered that mosquitoes transmit these microscopic protozoa. Just as this discovery was a big leap then, the next step today is to discern the parasite's blueprint; the genomic sequence of Plasmodium falciparum. Four hundred million people still suffer from malaria worldwide, and a million children die each year in Africa alone. There is no vaccine, anti-malarial drugs are failing, and many sufferers also develop tumours (such as Burkitt's lymphoma).

On page 532of this issue, Bowman et al.1 unveil the entire sequence of the P. falciparum chromosome 3. These authors have sequenced and analysed a million bases, which, along with the previously sequenced2 chromosome 2, now gives us 7% of the total P. falciparum genome (roughly 30 mega base-pairs, Mb). This complex genome comprises 14 chromosomes, each equivalent in size to a complete bacterial genome (0.65 to 3.4 Mb), as well as mitochondrial- and plastid-like sequences. Some 215 protein-coding genes are found on chromosome 3, compared with 209 on chromosome 2, giving an estimated 6,500 genes in the whole genome.

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Figure 1: Red blood cell infected with Plasmodium falciparum.

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Authors and Affiliations

  1. Microbiology and Tumour Biology Centre, Karolinska Institutet, and the Swedish Institute for Infectious Disease Control, Box 280, S-171 77 Stockholm, Sweden

    Mats Wahlgren & Maria Teresa Bejarano

Authors
  1. Mats Wahlgren
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  2. Maria Teresa Bejarano
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Wahlgren, M., Bejarano, M. Malaria A blueprint of ‘bad air’. Nature 400, 506–507 (1999). https://doi.org/10.1038/22880

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