Malaria remains a significant threat to human health with approximately 216 million cases annually and over 400,000 deaths worldwide. It is caused by the Plasmodium parasite, which has a complex lifecycle involving transmission to humans via the Anopheles mosquito.
New experimental research by the University of Glasgow and the Wellcome Sanger Institute published today in Nature Microbiology, demonstrates that a regulator protein, AP2-G, may hold the key to finding new approaches to prevent this potentially devastating disease. The study designed a new experimental system to investigate, in detail, the role of AP2-G in the parasite's life.