African thicket rat malaria linked to virulent ...(d surprising because the parasite found ...)

Date:12/22/2008

d surprising because the parasite found in African thicket ratsthe only malarial parasite to be discovered first in mosquitoes and only later in a vertebrate hostis the most common laboratory model for human malarial research. The ,P. falciparum,-rodent group is most closely related to malarial parasites that infect humans and primates in Asia and other primates in Africa. The other clades defined by this new evolutionary tree follow previously determined evolutionary trees for malaria-causing parasites, published earlier this year by Perkins and colleagues at the University of Vermont. These other phylogenies were based on both mitochondrial and nuclear DNA.

"The link between human malaria and rodent malaria is exciting because, if they really are that closely related, our laboratory models might be more powerful for helping to study how to fight the disease," says Perkins. She also believes that this link may include more than these species: as-yet unpublished data collected earlier in her lab found a closely related form of ,Plasmodium, in bats from the same area, and it may be that the most virulent form of malaria jumped into humans from these other arboreal animals. "Like Ebola and SARS, this could be another example of bat-human linkage. Although the results of this study are unambiguous, they are nonetheless still based on just a very small portion of the parasite's entire DNA."

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Contact: Kristin Elise Phillips kphillips@amnh.org 212-496-3419 American Museum of Natural History Source:Eurekalert

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