The disease now known as malaria was described as early as 2700 B.C. In the twenty-first century, this disease remains a leading cause of morbidity and mortality. WHO statistics estimate that to date there were 214 million cases of malaria and 438000 deaths in 2015 [1]. While five Plasmodium species can cause malaria in humans, Plasmodium, vivax and P. falciparum are the predominant species in ...

A longitudinal malaria study was undertaken in 1990-91 in 2 adjacent ecological zones in central India: villages in forest and villages away from the forest. The prevalence of Anopheles species varied widely between the 2 ecological settings. In the villages in forest, Anopheles culicifacies and An. fluviatilis were mainly exophilic, whereas in the villages away from forest, An. culicifacies wa...

The emergence of artemisinin-resistant Plasmodium falciparum malaria is a major threat to malaria elimination. New tools for supporting the surveillance of artemisinin resistance are critical for current and future malaria control and elimination strategies. We have developed an open-access, user-friendly, web-based tool to analyse parasite clearance half-life data of P. falciparum infected pat...

Apicomplexans, including the pathogens Plasmodium and Toxoplasma, carry a nonphotosynthetic plastid of secondary endosymbiotic origin called the apicoplast. The P. falciparum apicoplast contains a 35 kb, circular DNA genome with limited coding capacity that lacks genes encoding proteins for DNA organization and replication. We report identification of a nuclear-encoded bacterial histone-like pr...

Malaria remains one of the most serious infectious diseases in the world. Though there are four species of Plasmodium genus, but the most responsible and virulent among them is Plasmodium falciparum. The unique biochemical processes that exist in Plasmodium falciparum provide a useful way to develop novel inhibitors. One such biochemical pathway is methyl erythritol phosphate (MEP) pathway, req...

The primary focus of malaria research and control has been on Plasmodium falciparum, the most severe of the four Plasmodium species causing human disease. However, the presence of both P. falciparum and Plasmodium vivax occurs in several countries, including India. We developed a mathematical model describing the dynamics of P. vivax and P. falciparum in the human and mosquito populations and f...

Malaria is caused by an intracellular protozoan parasite of the genus Plasmodium. The use of chemotherapy, the foremost tool available for the control of the disease, has been challenged in the last decades by the development and spread of drug resistance among malaria parasites. A clear understanding behind the mechanisms of parasite resistance is required for the improvement of treatment effi...

Transmission of malaria is dependent on the successful completion of the Plasmodium lifecycle in the Anopheles vector. Major obstacles are encountered in the midgut tissue, where most parasites are killed by the mosquito's immune system. In the present study, DNA microarray analyses have been used to compare Anopheles gambiae responses to invasion of the midgut epithelium by the ookinete stage ...

Life threatening complication of Plasmodium falciparum malaria among those who visit forest villages of Madhya Pradesh (MP) are on the increase. In the earlier communication we reported case study of highly specialized professionals who visited forest villages of MP and had severe Plasmodium falciparum infection which caused high morbidity and mortality. These professionals did not take chemopr...

Human erythrocytes lacking various blood group determinants were susceptible to invasion by Plasmodium falciparum including Duffy-negative erythrocytes that are refractory to invasion by Plasmodium knowlesi. Erythrocytes treated with trypsin or neuraminidase had reduced susceptibility of P. falciparum and normal susceptibility to P. knowlesi. Chymotrypsin treatment (0.1 mg/ml) blocked invasion ...