Drug-Resistant Malaria Parasites

"Since the wide-scale deployment of antimalarial drugs in the latter half of the 20th century, human malaria parasites have been under tremendous selection pressure to evolve mechanisms of resistance" (White, 2003).

In other words, because the malaria parasite, Plasmodium, has been exposed to inadequate dosages of antimarial medications, it has grown resistant to many of the medicines that we have today.

Mosquitoes are the vector for malaria parasites and they use an anterior mode of transmission (the virus is transmitted through the bite of a mosquito and not its feces).

To better understand how humans are able to contract malaria, this diagram shows the life-cycle of Plasmodium.

Picture acquired from:

http://www.dpd.cdc.gov/dpdx/HTML/ImageLibrary/Malaria_il.htm

Our participation in Rosetta@home helps to fight diseases like malaria by generating new designs for protein folding. Proteins are extremely complex molecules; at a molecular level, form=function.

Before we forget, we've got to make a shout out to baddest man in the biological universe: C. Dar. Happy 200th fresh. R.I.P. big boy. U'll remain in our hearts 4eva.

References:

White, N.J., Pongtavornpinyo, W. 2003. "The de novo Selection of Drug-Resistant Malaria Parasites."

Biological Sciences. Vol. 270, No. 1514

BOINC platform

http://boinc.bakerlab.org/

evolution class & rosetta@home.

This weblog consists of a group (Sam, Kevin, and Josh) doing a study of the Rosetta@home research project. We are a group from Dr. Mindy Walker's Evolution class at Rockhurst University. Josh is running a grid-computing program for the topic and we will essentially be adding new material to this weblog as we go into more research throughout the semester.