The team, from the School of Life Sciences at the University of Nottingham in the United Kingdom, reports the findings in the journal PLOS Pathogens.
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Scientists have found the key to malaria growth during a study focusing on the specificities of the disease.
New, more potent treatments of malaria will be a huge achievement as, despite the preemptive vaccines and treatment courses that doctors have available at the moment, the disease is still responsible for more than half a million deaths every year.
Malaria is caused by a parasite and is a mosquito-borne disease. Before the new research, researchers only know a few things about the malaria parasite and its effects on cell development. Protein molecules known as cyclins cause cells to split quickly within the malara parasite, according to a different study brought with a team in the College of Nottingham. The vast majority of cases and deaths occur in sub-Saharan Africa.
Malaria is an interesting disease that requires both a mosquito and a mammal host in order to complete its life cycle.
Symptoms of malaria include fever and vomiting. These signs normally manifest between 10 to fifteen days after a plasmodium-carrying mosquito bites an individual.
However, in many parts of the world, the parasites have developed resistance to a number of malaria medicines.
The parasites live in mosquitoes and are transferred to human bodies. The P-type cyclin is closely related to cyclins found within plants, researchers said. This is known as the cell cycle and cyclins and their partners, cyclin-dependant kinases, are its master control proteins. In comparison along with other teams of cyclins, these produced an “exciting kind of cell division”.
Using a species of Plasmodium that infects rats, the researchers showed that deleting CYC3 led to several abnormalities in this unusual type of cell division while the parasite is in the mosquito. This speedy development allows the parasite to shortly unfold amongst purple blood cells. During the asexual process, the chromosomes inside the cell nucleus divide but the nucleus itself does not – this is called “endomitosis”.
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Based on Dr Magali Roques, charge author from the study (The study) will certainly further our knowledge of parasite cell division, that we hope can result in the removal of this ailment later on.
