Skip to main page content
U.S. flag

An official website of the United States government

Dot gov

The .gov means it’s official.
Federal government websites often end in .gov or .mil. Before sharing sensitive information, make sure you’re on a federal government site.

Https

The site is secure.
The https:// ensures that you are connecting to the official website and that any information you provide is encrypted and transmitted securely.

Access keys NCBI Homepage MyNCBI Homepage Main Content Main Navigation
Review
. 2015 May 11:6:391.
doi: 10.3389/fmicb.2015.00391. eCollection 2015.

Enlightening the malaria parasite life cycle: bioluminescent Plasmodium in fundamental and applied research

Giulia Siciliano  1 , Pietro Alano  1
Affiliations
Review

Enlightening the malaria parasite life cycle: bioluminescent Plasmodium in fundamental and applied research

Giulia Siciliano et al. Front Microbiol. .

Abstract

The unicellular protozoan parasites of the genus Plasmodium impose on human health worldwide the enormous burden of malaria. The possibility to genetically modify several species of malaria parasites represented a major advance in the possibility to elucidate their biology and is now turning laboratory lines of transgenic Plasmodium into precious weapons to fight malaria. Amongst the various genetically modified plasmodia, transgenic parasite lines expressing bioluminescent reporters have been essential to unveil mechanisms of parasite gene expression and to develop in vivo imaging approaches in mouse malaria models. Mainly the human malaria parasite Plasmodium falciparum and the rodent parasite P. berghei have been engineered to express bioluminescent reporters in almost all the developmental stages of the parasite along its complex life cycle between the insect and the vertebrate hosts. Plasmodium lines expressing conventional and improved luciferase reporters are now gaining a central role to develop cell based assays in the much needed search of new antimalarial drugs and to open innovative approaches for both fundamental and applied research in malaria.

Keywords: Plasmodium; bioluminescence; cell-based screening assays; in vivo imaging; malaria; reporter genes.

PubMed Disclaimer

Figures

FIGURE 1
FIGURE 1
Transgenic bioluminescent malaria parasites at different stages of their development in the vertebrate and mosquito hosts. The central diagram represents the Plasmodium life cycle, showing the progression through the developmental stages of the parasites in the mosquito vector and in the vertebrate host. (A) Bioluminescence imaging (BLI) of individual Plasmodium falciparum gametocytes expressing a click beetle luciferase under a sexual stage-specific promoter. The bright field image shows immobilized gametocytes, highlighted in green, amongst uninfected erythrocytes; the dark field shows the bioluminescence signal of the gametocytes incubated with D-luciferin. Magnification bar: 15 μm. (Adapted from Cevenini et al., 2014). (B) BLI of a mouse infected with asexual P. berghei parasites expressing a firefly luciferase-green fluorescent protein (GFP) fusion. Heatmap of the bioluminescent signal identifies the sites of accumulation of the parasites (Reproduced with permission from Claser et al., 2011). (C) Fluorescence of a firefly luciferase-GFP fusion protein expressed in P. falciparum sporozoites contained in a oocyst and (D) obtained from the dissection of infected mosquito salivary glands. Magnification bar: 5 μm. (E) In vivo bioluminescent signal obtained by transgenic P. falciparum liver stage parasites developing in the chimeric liver of a humanized mouse (C–E) are reproduced with permission from Vaughan et al. (2012).
See this image and copyright information in PMC

Similar articles

See all similar articles

Cited by

See all "Cited by" articles

References

    1. Adjalley S. H., Johnston G. L., Li T., Eastman R. T., Ekland E. H., Eappen A. G., et al. (2011). Quantitative assessment of Plasmodium falciparum sexual development reveals potent transmission-blocking activity by methylene blue. Proc. Natl. Acad. Sci. U.S.A. 108 E1214–E1223 10.1073/pnas.1112037108 - DOI - PMC - PubMed
    1. Amante F. H., Stanley A. C., Randall L. M., Zhou Y., Haque A., McSweeney K., et al. (2007). A role for natural regulatory T cells in the pathogenesis of experimental cerebral malaria. Am. J. Pathol. 171 548–559 10.2353/ajpath.2007.061033 - DOI - PMC - PubMed
    1. Annoura T., Chevalley S., Janse C. J., Franke-Fayard B., Khan S. M. (2013). Quantitative analysis of Plasmodium berghei liver stages by bioluminescence imaging. Methods Mol. Biol. 923 429–443 10.1007/978-1-62703-026-7_30 - DOI - PubMed
    1. Annoura T., Ploemen I. H., van Schaijk B. C., Sajid M., Vos M. W., van Gemert G. J., et al. (2012). Assessing the adequacy of attenuation of genetically modified malaria parasite vaccine candidates. Vaccine. 30 2662–2670 10.1016/j.vaccine.2012.02.010 - DOI - PubMed
    1. Azevedo M. F., del Portillo H. A. (2007). Promoter regions of Plasmodium vivax are poorly or not recognized by Plasmodium falciparum. Malar. J. 6 20 10.1186/1475-2875-6-20 - DOI - PMC - PubMed

LinkOut - more resources