Scientists at Washington University School of Medicine in St. Louis have identified a protein made by the malaria parasite that is essential to its ability to take over human red blood cells.
Malaria, which is spread by mosquito bites, kills between 1 million and 3 million people annually in Third World countries. Death results from damage to red blood cells and clogging of the capillaries that feed the brain and other organs.
"The malaria parasite seizes control of and remodels the red blood cell by secreting hundreds of proteins once it's inside," says Dan Goldberg, M.D., Ph.D., professor of medicine and of molecular microbiology and a Howard Hughes Medical Institute Investigator. "But without this protein, plasmepsin V, those other proteins can't get out of the parasite into the blood cell, and the infectious process stops."
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