23 January 2012
A team of researchers led by Kasturi Haldar and Souvik Bhattacharjee of the University of Notre Dame’s Center for Rare and Neglected Diseases, has made a fundamental discovery in understanding how malaria parasites target proteins to the surface of the red blood cell that enables sticking to and blocking blood vessels thus causing the deadly disease.
Malaria kills nearly a million people each year and is caused by a parasite that infects red cells in the blood.
Haldar and Bhattacharjee and their collaborators discovered that for host-targeted malaria proteins the first step is binding to the lipid phosphatidylinositol 3 phosphate in the endoplasmic reticulum from where they are delivered to other parts of the cell.
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