Featured Article Academic Journal Main Category: Tropical Diseases Also Included In: Infectious Diseases / Bacteria / Viruses Article Date: 29 Apr 2013 - 4:00 PDT

Current ratings for: Genetic Fingerprints Track Drug-Resistant Malaria Parasites

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Senior author Dominic Kwiatkowski, from the University of Oxford and the Wellcome Trust Sanger Institute near Cambridge, and colleagues, discovered the new artemisinin-resistant strains in western Cambodia, a known hotspot for drug-resistance. They write about this, and how they were able to identify distinct genetic patterns for each of the strains, in the 28 April online issue of Nature Genetics.

Artemisinin is the key drug against malaria, which is caused when the parasite P. falciparum gets into the bloodstream through a mosquito bite. However, according to the World Health Organization (WHO), the emergence of drug-resistant strains of the parasite is weakening the impact of artemisinin, putting hundreds of thousands of lives at risk.

Co-author Nicholas White, a professor from the Centre for Tropical Medicine at the University of Oxford, says in a statement:

"Artemisinin resistance is an emergency which could derail all the good work of global malaria control in recent years. We desperately need methods to track it in order to contain it, and molecular fingerprinting provides this."

Using new genome sequencing technologies, the international group sequenced the entire DNA of 825 P. falciparum samples from South East Asia and Africa and found an "unusual pattern of parasite population structure at the epicenter of artemisinin resistance in western Cambodia".

The technologies enabled them to pick out genetic patterns or "fingerprints" for each of the artemisinin-resistant strains.

Kwiatkowski tells the press:

See more here:
Genetic Fingerprints Track Drug-Resistant Malaria Parasites

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