Malaria’s new guises
By Brian Vastag
The complicated life cycle of the malaria parasite has just taken another swerve. Scientists have observed Plasmodium falciparum enjoying three distinct lifestyles in the blood of infected children. Two of these three states have never been seen before, and one of those two appears to cause an unusually severe illness.
The findings highlight new targets for future anti-malaria drugs, says the Massachusetts Institute of Technology’s Aviv Regev, a computational biologist involved in the study.