Latest Plasmodium berghei Stories
U.S. scientists say they've identified the way in which the malaria parasite enters human red blood cells -- a finding that might lead to a malaria vaccine. Virginia Commonwealth University researchers said although scientists have long known a molecule called glycophorin B, which is found on the surface of human red blood cells, is important for the invasion of the malaria parasite, the specific molecule by which the malaria parasite attaches itself to invade the host was not known. Using a...
Temperature is an important factor in the spread of malaria and other mosquito-borne diseases, but researchers who look at average monthly or annual temperatures are not seeing the whole picture. Global climate change will affect daily temperature variations, which can have a more pronounced effect on parasite development, according to a Penn State entomologist."We need higher resolution environmental and biological data to understand how climate change will affect the spread of the...
It was announced on Wednesday that scientists have tracked the genomes of the parasite that is the foundation of the majority of malaria cases outside of Africa. They have also discovered the monkey parasite that is increasingly a significant cause of malaria for people in Southeast Asia.This information ought to help bring to light new drugs and vaccines to combat the mosquito-borne disease. "It's going to be a very powerful tool," Jane Carlton of the New York University Langone...
By disrupting the potassium channel of the malaria parasite, a team of researchers has been able to prevent the malaria parasites from forming in mosquitoes and has thereby broken the cycle of infection during recent animal tests.By genetically altering the malaria parasite through gene knock-out technology, a research team consisting of scientists at the University of Copenhagen and John Hopkins University, Baltimore, has prevented the parasite from going through the normal stages of its...
WASHINGTON -- Researchers have developed a malaria-resistant mosquito, a step that might one day help block the spread of an illness that has claimed millions of lives around the world.When they fed on malaria-infected mice, the resistant mosquitoes had a higher survival rate than nonresistant ones, meaning they could eventually replace the ones that can carry the disease, according to a report in Tuesday's issue of Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences.Jason Rasgon of the...
San Diego, CA "“ Researchers at UCSD have discovered that the single-celled parasite responsible for an estimated 1 million deaths per year worldwide from malaria has protein "wiring" that differs markedly from the cellular circuitry of other higher organisms, a finding which could lead to the development of antimalarial drugs that exploit that difference.The scientists will report in the Nov. 3 issue of Nature a comparison of newly discovered protein-interactions in Plasmodium falciparum...
LONDON (Reuters) - Unusual "wiring" in the cells of the malaria parasite could be a key to developing new treatments for the disease that kills millions of people each year, scientists said on Wednesday. Two teams of researchers in the United States have discovered that sets of proteins, which are essential for cells to function and communicate with each other, interact differently in the Plasmodium falciparum parasite than in other organisms. "We expected Plasmodium to be different,"...
Researchers have identified a gene in mosquitoes that helps the insects to fight off infection by the Plasmodium parasite, which causes malaria in humans. Anopheles mosquitoes transmit the malaria parasite to nearly 550 million people worldwide each year with these cases resulting in more than 2 million deaths annually. The protective gene was identified in a study conducted by a team of investigators from the Johns Hopkins Bloomberg School of Public Health\'s Malaria Research Institute, the...
