Plasmodium falciparum erythrocyte membrane protein 1 in the role of parasites in immune evasion.doc

 PAGE \* MERGEFORMAT 12 Plasmodium falciparum erythrocyte membrane protein 1 in the role of parasites in immune evasion Malaria is the most serious tropical disease in a parasitic disease. Mosquito-borne malaria and the emergence of drug resistance, war, natural disasters, frequent movement of personnel, as well as in recent years, global warming on malaria around the world have produced a more serious impact. Thus, malaria, vaccine imminent. Parasite’s immune evasion mechanisms are one of the difficulties of the study. Parasite immune evasion mechanisms there are many, such as antigenic variation, cell adhesion, suppression of host immune response or damage to, molecular modeling and T epitope polymorphism and so on. More and more studies have found Plasmodium falciparum erythrocyte membrane protein 1 (Plasmodium falciparum erythrocyte membrane protein 1, PfEMP1) in immune evasion has an important position, which can participate in antigenic variation and by the dyed cells (infected red blood cell, IRBC) cell adhesion to endothelial cells. 1 PfEMP1 Molecular Biology PfEMP1 (200 ~ 350KD) is an important target antigen family, in the period of asexual blood parasites from the var gene expression, through some unknown way to transport to the IRBC surface of knob structure at, and then inserted into the IRBC membrane, significantly exposed is not only involved in antigenic variation, are also involved in cell adhesion and Rosetting (IRBC and normal red blood cell adhesion) [1]. Recently found that not only the asexual blood cycle, but sexual transmission period can express PfEMP1 variants [2]. Although PfEMP1 is a variant molecule, but it still has some common structural features. The var genes encoding PfEMP1 is a large multi-gene family [3 ~ 5], accounting for Plasmodium falciparum (Plasmodium falciparum, Pf) genome 6%, with 50 ~ 150 members, each of var gene 10 ~ 12kb, with two exons: 5 ‘exon highly polymorphic, encoding PfEMP1 extracellular region and tran