Plasmodium

There wouldn't be any way back if we did this, if we decided to go through with it.

And so we're actually talking about the extinction of two species here, aren't we? So malaria is caused by Plasmodium parasites, so they're single cell parasites, and they're transmitted through the bite of female mosquitoes.

Four species of Plasmodium are human parasites, so when we talk about malaria extinction specifically, we mean Plasmodium falciparum, which is responsible for over 99% of malaria related deaths, and then Plasmodium vivax, which is widely distributed in rural settings and is estimated to be responsible for 64% of total cases of malaria.

Obviously, this is, uh, there is an argument of making a species extinct being a problem.

Do you think that's what the people in your talks were referring to? What is it that you think makes them say no?

So I agree.

So there's not...

So we're not worried about intrinsic value of the Plasmodium species.

Protozoa are unicellular organisms, some of which can cause disease.

For example, species within the genus Plasmodium cause malaria, and Giardia causes diarrheal disease.

Remember, these organisms are eukaryotes.

Their cells are fundamentally different, so they're very different from bacteria, and where that comes into play is when it comes to treatment.

They absolutely must have a host to survive and complete their life cycle.

The Plasmodium species, which causes malaria, cannot survive on its own in a puddle of water.

It needs a mosquito and it needs a human.

But not all of them are that dependent.

Yeah, I mean, I guess it's an unusual strategy in the sense that they've had to develop this pretty sophisticated mechanism to escape.

I mean, you know, Plasmodium actually does expose a lot of its proteins as well to the host.

So they're kind of hiding away, but then exposing themselves in a different way.

But yeah, African trypanosomes are completely exposed to adaptive immunity.

As I said, they have to expose variant proteins on the red blood cell surface.

They only have 60 of those genes.

So then the question immediately arises, how are these parasites going to persist for long periods of time if they have such a small reservoir of genes? So it's not entirely clear how they do that because recombination and stitching together gene fragments has not really been documented in Plasmodium.

And then a similar question arises with T. brucei because only about 300 of those genes are fully intact.