Parasite physiology articles within Nature

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  • Letter |

    Plasmodium parasites, the causative agent of malaria, infect and remodel red blood cells by exporting hundreds of proteins into the red blood cell cytosol, a topological conundrum given that the parasite resides in a compartment known as the parasitophorous vacuole; here a dihydrofolate-reductase-based destabilization domain approach is used to inactivate HSP101, part of the Plasmodium translocon of exported proteins, and to demonstrate that it is required for the secretion of all classes of exported Plasmodium proteins.

    • Josh R. Beck
    • , Vasant Muralidharan
    •  & Daniel E. Goldberg

  • Letter |

    A central hub of carbon metabolism is the tricarboxylic acid (TCA) cycle, which serves to connect the processes of glycolysis, gluconeogenesis, respiration, amino acid synthesis and other biosynthetic pathways. These authors show that TCA metabolism in the human malaria parasite Plasmodium falciparum is largely disconnected from glycolysis and is organized along a fundamentally different architecture — not cyclic, but branched — from the canonical textbook pathway.

    • Kellen L. Olszewski
    • , Michael W. Mather
    •  & Manuel Llinás

  • News & Views |

    One of the hallmarks of cellular biochemistry is the ability to extract energy efficiently from available substrates. The malaria parasite, however, deviates from the norm, and has come up with its own solution.

    • Hagai Ginsburg

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