Publications related to Plasmodium falciparum

Potent Virustatic Polymer-Lipid Nanomimics Block Viral Entry and Inhibit Malaria Parasites In Vivo

Infectious diseases continue to pose a substantial burden on global populations, requiring innovative broad-spectrum prophylactic and treatment alternatives. Here, we have designed modular synthetic polymer nanopartides that mimic functional components of ...

AMER CHEMICAL SOC2022

NICEdrug.ch, a workflow for rational drug design and systems-level analysis of drug metabolism

Vassily Hatzimanikatis, Jasmin Maria Hafner, Homa Mohammadi Peyhani, Noushin Hadadi, Anush Chiappino-Pepe

The discovery of a drug requires over a decade of intensive research and financial investments – and still has a high risk of failure. To reduce this burden, we developed the NICEdrug.ch resource, which incorporates 250,000 bioactive molecules, and studied ...

2021

EPD in 2020: enhanced data visualization and extension to ncRNA promoters

Giovanna Ambrosini, Philipp Bucher, Romain Fernand Pietro Groux, René Dreos, Patrick Meylan

The Eukaryotic Promoter Database (EPD), available online at https://epd.epfl.ch, provides accurate transcription start site (TSS) information for promoters of 15 model organisms plus corresponding functional genomics data that can be viewed in a genome bro ...

2020

Optimization methods and objective functions for analysis of metabolic network models

Zhaleh Hosseini

Computational studies of metabolism aim to systematically analyze the metabolic behaviour of biological systems in different conditions. Genome-scale metabolic network models (GEMs) capture the connection between elements of the network by applying stoichi ...

EPFL2020

Structures of three MORN repeat proteins and a re-evaluation of the proposed lipid-binding properties of MORN repeats

Charlotte Julie Caroline Gehin

MORN (Membrane Occupation and Recognition Nexus) repeat proteins have a wide taxonomic distribution, being found in both prokaryotes and eukaryotes. Despite this ubiquity, they remain poorly characterised at both a structural and a functional level compare ...

2020

Phosphorylation of the VAR2CSA extracellular region is associated with enhanced adhesive properties to the placental receptor CSA

Romain Hamelin, Florence Armand, Marc Moniatte

Plasmodium falciparum is the main cause of disease and death from malaria. P. falciparum virulence resides in the ability of infected erythrocytes (IEs) to sequester in various tissues through the interaction between members of the polymorphic P. falciparu ...

2019

Targeting liver stage malaria with metformin

Leonardo Filipe Lemos Rocha

Despite an unprecedented 2 decades of success, the combat against malaria - the mosquito-transmitted disease caused by Plasmodium parasites - is no longer progressing. Efforts toward eradication are threatened by the lack of an effective vaccine and a rise ...

2019

Genome-Scale Identification of Essential Metabolic Processes for Targeting the Plasmodium Liver Stage

Vassily Hatzimanikatis, Vikash Kumar Pandey, Anush Chiappino-Pepe, Dominique Soldati-Favre

Plasmodium gene functions in mosquito and liver stages remain poorly characterized due to limitations in the throughput of phenotyping at these stages. To fill this gap, we followed more than 1,300 barcoded P. berghei mutants through the life cycle. We dis ...

2019

Antigens reversibly conjugated to a polymeric glyco-adjuvant induce protective humoral and cellular immunity

Jeffrey Alan Hubbell, Xavier Fredy René Quaglia-Thermes, Melody Swartz, Giacomo Olimpio Diaceri, Sachiko Hirosue, Laura Jeanbart, David Scott Wilson, Maria Anna Sofia Broggi, Michal Mateusz Raczy, Ruyi Wang

Fully effective vaccines for complex infections must elicit a diverse repertoire of antibodies (humoral immunity) and CD8+ T-cell responses (cellular immunity). Here, we present a synthetic glyco-adjuvant named p(Man-TLR7), which, when conjugated to antige ...

NATURE PUBLISHING GROUP2019

Analysis of cellular and drug action mechanisms in the malaria parasites using systems biology approaches

Anush Chiappino-Pepe

Malaria puts at risk of infection half of the world population and still kills around half a million people every year. The rapid and worrisome rise of drug-resistant malaria parasites hinders the treatment of malaria and calls for a global collaboration t ...

EPFL2018

Recent Advances of Malaria Parasites Detection Systems Based on Mathematical Morphology

Michel Kocher

Malaria is an epidemic health disease and a rapid, accurate diagnosis is necessary for proper intervention. Generally, pathologists visually examine blood stained slides for malaria diagnosis. Nevertheless, this kind of visual inspection is subjective, err ...

2018

Bioenergetics-based modeling of Plasmodium falciparum metabolism reveals its essential genes, nutritional requirements, and thermodynamic bottlenecks

Vassily Hatzimanikatis, Meriç Ataman, Stepan Tymoshenko, Dominique Soldati-Favre, Anush Chiappino-Pepe

Novel antimalarial therapies are urgently needed for the fight against drug-resistant para- sites. The metabolism of malaria parasites in infected cells is an attractive source of drug targets but is rather complex. Computational methods can handle this co ...

Public Library of Science2017

Reconstruction and systems analysis of metabolism in apicomplexan parasites Toxoplasma gondii and Plasmodium falciparum

Stepan Tymoshenko

Understanding of metabolism in disease-causing microorganisms promotes drug design through the identification of the enzymes whose activity is indispensable for important cellular functions of the pathogens. Nowadays such understanding arises from experime ...

EPFL2015

Malaria Parasite-Infected Erythrocytes Secrete PfCK1, the Plasmodium Homologue of the Pleiotropic Protein Kinase Casein Kinase 1

Romain Hamelin, Florence Armand, Marc Moniatte

Casein kinase 1 (CK1) is a pleiotropic protein kinase implicated in several fundamental processes of eukaryotic cell biology. Plasmodium falciparum encodes a single CK1 isoform, PfCK1, that is expressed at all stages of the parasite's life cycle. We have p ...

Public Library of Science2015

Regulation of Plasmodium falciparum Development by Calcium-dependent Protein Kinase 7 (PfCDPK7)

Second messengers such as phosphoinositides and calcium are known to control diverse processes involved in the development of malaria parasites. However, the underlying molecular mechanisms and pathways need to be unraveled, which may be achieved by unders ...

Amer Soc Biochemistry Molecular Biology Inc2014

Inhibition of the SR Protein-Phosphorylating CLK Kinases of Plasmodium falciparum Impairs Blood Stage Replication and Malaria Transmission

Cyclin-dependent kinase-like kinases (CLKs) are dual specificity protein kinases that phosphorylate Serine/Arginine-rich (SR) proteins involved in pre-mRNA processing. Four CLKs, termed PfCLK-1-4, can be identified in the human malaria parasite Plasmodium ...

Public Library Science2014

Multitarget Drug Discovery for Tuberculosis and Other Infectious Diseases

Stewart Cole, Benoit Lechartier, Wei Zhu, Kai Li

We report the discovery of a series of new drug leads that have potent activity against Mycobacterium tuberculosis as well as against other bacteria, fungi, and a malaria parasite. The compounds are analogues of the new tuberculosis (TB) drug SQ109 (1), wh ...

Amer Chemical Soc2014

Functional genomics of Plasmodium falciparum using metabolic modelling and analysis

Vassily Hatzimanikatis, Stepan Tymoshenko, Rebecca Oppenheim, Dominique Soldati-Favre

Plasmodium falciparum is an obligate intracellular parasite and the leading cause of severe malaria responsible for tremendous morbidity and mortality particularly in sub-Saharan Africa. Successful completion of the P. falciparum genome sequencing project ...

Oxford Univ Press2013

Expression in Yeast Links Field Polymorphisms in PfATP6 to in Vitro Artemisinin Resistance and Identifies New Inhibitor Classes

Serena Pulcini

Background. The mechanism of action of artemisinins against malaria is unclear, despite their widespread use in combination therapies and the emergence of resistance. Results. Here, we report expression of PfATP6 (a SERCA pump) in yeast and demonstrate its ...

Oxford University Press2013

The Plasmodium falciparum, Nima-related kinase Pfnek-4: a marker for asexual parasites committed to sexual differentiation

Miguel Garcia

Background: Malaria parasites undergo, in the vertebrate host, a developmental switch from asexual replication to sexual differentiation leading to the formation of gametocytes, the only form able to survive in the mosquito vector. Regulation of the onset ...

Biomed Central Ltd2012