Plasmodium falciparum Sexual Development Transcriptome: A Microarray Analysis using Ontology-Based Pattern Identification

摘要

The sexual stages of malarial parasites are essential for the mosquito transmission of the disease and therefore are the focus of transmission blocking drug and vaccine development. In order to better understand genes important to the sexual development process, the transcriptomes of high-purity stage I V Plasmodium falciparum gametocytes were comprehensively profiled using a full-genome high-density oligonucleotide microarray. The interpretation of this transcriptional data was aided by applying a novel knowledge-based data-mining algorithm termed ontology-based pattern identification (OPI) using current information regarding known sexual stage genes as a guide. This analysis resulted in the identification of a sexual development cluster containing 246 genes, of which.