Changes in metabolic phenotypes of Plasmodium falciparum in vitro cultures during gametocyte development

Malaria Journal

Research

Ursula Straschil¹  Michael J Delves¹  Sabrina D Lamour²  Jasmina Saric² 

[1] Department of Life Sciences, Imperial College London, SW7 2AZ, London, UK;Division of Computational and Systems Medicine, Department of Surgery and Cancer, Imperial College London, SW7 2AZ, London, UK;

关键词: Plasmodium;    Gametocyte;    Gametocytogenesis;    Culture;    Metabolic;    Asexual;    Sexual;    Maturation;    Differentiation;    Nutritional;   

DOI  :  10.1186/1475-2875-13-468

 received in 2014-10-09, accepted in 2014-11-24,  发布年份 2014

来源: Springer

【 摘 要 】

BackgroundGametocytes are the Plasmodium life stage that is solely responsible for malaria transmission. Despite their important role in perpetuating malaria, gametocyte differentiation and development is poorly understood.MethodsTo shed light on the biochemical changes that occur during asexual and gametocyte development, metabolic characterization of media from in vitro intra-erythrocytic Plasmodium falciparum cultures was performed throughout gametocyte development by applying 1H nuclear magnetic spectroscopy, and using sham erythrocyte cultures as controls. Spectral differences between parasite and sham cultures were assessed via principal component analyses and partial-least squares analyses, and univariate statistical methods.ResultsClear parasite-associated changes in metabolism were observed throughout the culture period, revealing differences between asexual parasites and gametocyte stages. With culture progression and development of gametocytes, parasitic release of the glycolytic end products lactate, pyruvate, alanine, and glycerol, were found to be dramatically reduced whilst acetate release was greatly increased. Also, uptake of lipid moieties CH2, CH3, and CH = CH-CH2-CH2 increased throughout gametocyte development, peaking with maturity.ConclusionsThis study uniquely presents an initial characterization of the metabolic exchange between parasite and culture medium during in vitro P. falciparum gametocyte culture. Results suggest that energy metabolism and lipid utilization between the asexual stages and gametocytes is different. This study provides new insights for gametocyte-specific nutritional requirements to aid future optimization and standardization of in vitro gametocyte cultivation, and highlights areas of novel gametocyte cell biology that deserve to be studied in greater detail and may yield new targets for transmission-blocking drugs.

【 授权许可】

Unknown   
© Lamour et al.; licensee BioMed Central Ltd. 2014. This article is published under license to BioMed Central Ltd. This is an Open Access article distributed under the terms of the Creative Commons Attribution License (http://creativecommons.org/licenses/by/4.0), which permits unrestricted use, distribution, and reproduction in any medium, provided the original work is properly credited. The Creative Commons Public Domain Dedication waiver (http://creativecommons.org/publicdomain/zero/1.0/) applies to the data made available in this article, unless otherwise stated.