BEIJING, Oct. 27 (Xinhua) -- Springer Nature's international professional academic journal Nature recently published a research paper on infectious diseases, saying that Plasmodium falciparum is the main parasite that causes malaria, and by changing its gene expression, this malaria parasite can remain in the human blood in small amounts during the dry season, but it does not cause disease.
The study explains how Plasmodium falciparum remains in the human body without causing visible symptoms, helping malaria spread again when mosquito populations make a comeback during the rainy season.
Malaria is known to be the leading lethal disease in Africa, with most cases concentrated during the rainy season, when mosquitoes that transmit Plasmodium falciparum multiply in large numbers; however, asymptomatic infected people can occur all year round. The parasite's ability to reside in human hosts allows them to survive months of dry periods between rainy seasons. However, researchers have not quite understood why the parasite can reside in a human host without causing visible symptoms.
To that end, Silvia Portugal, corresponding author of the newly published paper, Silvia Portugal of the Max Planck Institute for Infection Biology in Berlin, Germany, and colleagues tracked 600 Malian residents ranging in age from 3 months to 45 years between 2017 and 2018. They found that the genetic transcription patterns of Plasmodium falciparum in these populations near the end of the dry season were unique. This pattern is associated with a decrease in vascular adhesion of infected red blood cells, which facilitates the spleen to clear infected blood cells to a lower level.
According to the authors, these features help maintain a lower level of Plasmodium falciparum reservoir in the human body, which can be undetected and cleared by the immune system, continuing to initiate the cycle of malaria transmission in the following rainy season. They noted that further research is needed to elucidate how environmental changes affect the transcriptional patterns of Falciparum malaria, which are known to allow Plasmodium falciparum to survive in specific settings. (End)
Source: China News Network
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