Closing In on a Deadly Parasite's Genome

摘要

There's no better way to locate the soft underbelly of a pathogen than through its genome. The genome provides a view of all the key proteins involved in infection and in the pathogen's life cycle. And those proteins make good drug targets. Sequencers are now barreling through the genome of the most virulent malaria parasite, Plasmodium falciparum, and they hope soon to turn their sequencing machines loose on the genome of the Anopheles mosquito that transmits it. Combined with the emerging data on the human genetic code, "the three [genomes] will go a long way in helping us understand this disease," says Michael Gottlieb, a parasitologist at the National Institute of Allergy and Infectious Diseases (NIAID) in Bethesda, Maryland.