Malaria

Group

Flavia, Luojun, Ottavia

Which parts of the immune system are regulating pathogens populations? How many strains are there?
- British Society of Immunology | Malaria
- Over 100 Plasmodium named species, 4 (5?) are true parasites of humans: P. falciparum, P. vivax, P. ovale and P. malariae (CDC)
What explains patterns of genetic diversity?
- Highly diverse both within and between patients due to antigenic variation (positive diversifying selection on the var gene families) (Cui et al. 2003)
- Higher genetic diversity in areas with a higher transmission rate because meiotic recombination takes place in the vector part of the parasite life cycle (Cui et al. 2003, Day et al. 2017)
- Co-infections with multiple strains are common in endemic regions: higher probabilities for generating new combinations (Creasey et al. 1990)
- Antimalarial drugs might have limited genetic diversity in P. falciparum through several selective sweeps or a bottleneck (Wooton et al. 2002).
- P.vivax exhibits higher genetic diversity compared to P.falciparum likely because the latter has recently experienced selective sweeps for drug resistance (Hupalo et al. 2016, Neafsey et al. 2012).
What explains population dynamics?
- Population level
- Within-host
What's an outstanding question for your system? How would you conduct a study to address this and how would you analyze data from this study?