Malaria Literature Review

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CHAPTER TWO LITERATURE REVIEW 2.1 Biology of the Malaria parasite Malaria is caused by members of the genus Plasmodium, an apicomplexa which exhibits a heteroxenous life cycle involving a vertebrate host and an arthropod vector. Four distinct species infected humans: P. falciparum, P. vivax, P. ovale and P. malariae (Krogstad, 2000). The P. falcipurum has 4 stages which mark the life cycle in the liver, blood and within the Anopheline mosquitoes. Sporozoites are injected with the saliva during mosquito feeding and enter the circulatory system and within 30-60 minutes will invade a liver cell, later maturing into a merozoite. These merozoites then invade erythrocytes developing to a trophozoite which undergo multiple rounds of erythrocytic schizogony (Alan and Brendan, 2006), followed by macrogametocytes which are taken up by the mosquito vector and fuse resulting into a zygote that later develops into an ookinete…show more content…
In this apicomplexan organism the apicoplast has lost much of its photosynthetic function with most of its genome material being directed to the nucleus, protein expression, survival and replication is localized in the small 35-kb circular genome of this organelle, consistence with this observation is the study by Waller et al. (2000) where they observed that protein trafficking is localized and concentrated in this important organelle. Essentiality of the apicoplast properties makes it an ideal drug target in the late liver stage including antibiotics like clindamycin, tetracycline and Azithromycin which have antiplasmodial activity (Sidhu et al., 2007), the mechanistic action of this antibiotic inhibition is that they cause a delayed death thus biogenesis and inheritance of the apicoplast is blocked by putatively targeting the pathways of protein translation in this
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