Malaria remains a considerable public health burden in many parts of the world. It is caused by Plasmodium parasites, which are transmitted by mosquitoes and undergo complex developmental cycles in both the insect vector and vertebrate hosts. Malaria research has greatly benefited from technological advances in genetic engineering, next-generation sequencing and structural biology, providing new insights into parasite development and transmission, and host-parasite interactions.
This collection highlights an assembly of important papers representative of multidisciplinary malaria research, delving into fundamental questions concerning the biology of the parasite at cellular, molecular and structural levels, malaria transmission and pathogenesis, drug resistance and vaccine development.
Other relevant articles can be found on eLife's Tropical Disease: A Collection of Articles and on our subject page for Microbiology and Infectious Disease.
Collection
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Cell Biology
Plasmodium parasite transcription shifts dramatically along asexual development, and transmission stages variably express important immune evasion genes, suggesting much interesting biology has until now been hidden by bulk analyses.
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Cell Biology
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Microbiology and Infectious Disease
Formin-2 controls spatiotemporal polymerisation of actin filaments, a common mechanism used by apicomplexans for effective segregation of essential chloroplast-like organelles called apicoplasts, and additionally for daughter formation in Plasmodium falciparum.
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Epidemiology and Global Health
Mathematical models of the build-up and depletion of the hypnozoite reservoir in the liver can inform the design of treatment strategies for preventing Plasmodium vivax relapse infections.
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Microbiology and Infectious Disease
LISP2 expression marks the beginning of awakening of dormant hypnozoite to developing malaria liver stages, which are susceptible to a novel prophylactic drug, Plasmodium PI4K inhibitor.
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Ecology
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Epidemiology and Global Health
A field study coupled with a molecular analysis demonstrates that using hematophagous flies as 'flying syringes' could be used to investigate blood-borne pathogen diversity in wild vertebrates and act as an early detection tool of zoonotic pathogens.
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Genetics and Genomics
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Evolutionary Biology
If released in the wild, current CRISPR-based gene drive systems designed to alter populations could spread much farther than intended, despite the evolution of drive resistance.
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Genetics and Genomics
Minimal genetic modifications of endogenous mosquito genes allow the tissue-specific expression of anti-malarial effectors and convert them into efficient non-autonomous gene drives.
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Immunology and Inflammation
The structure of a human antibody in which the variable loops position a human protein LAIR1 for antigen recognition, reveals a novel and indirect mode of antibody function.
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Structural Biology and Molecular Biophysics
The molecular mechanism behind how emetine inhibits the ribosome of the human malaria parasite, along with structural details of the complex formed, is revealed at high resolution using cryo-electron microscopy.
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Epidemiology and Global Health
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Microbiology and Infectious Disease
Plasmodium falciparum K13 mutations confer resistance to the antimalarial artemisinin in Asian and African parasites, with most gene-edited mutant K13 African parasite lines showing a fitness cost that may predict slow dissemination of artemisinin resistance in high-transmission settings.
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Biochemistry and Chemical Biology
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Plant Biology
A combination of chloroplast transformation with nuclear transformation and large-scale metabolic screening of supertransformed plant lines has enabled an entire biochemical pathway to be transferred from a medicinal plant to a high-biomass crop.
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