Malaria is responsible for approximately one million deaths annually resulting in an enormous public health burden on many of the tropical and subtropical countries. Moreover, the burden due to malaria keeps increasing because of the spread of drug resistant parasites. Therefore, there is an urgent need for the discovery of new malaria vaccines and drugs. We synthesized protein microarrays of malaria parasite and erythrocyte using the wheat germ cell-free system for accelerating post-genomic malaria research and novel malaria vaccine candidate and drug target discovery.
Our goal is to understand the molecular mechanism of parasite invasion into erythrocyte from the protein-protein interaction point of view. These approaches now open promising avenues for the identifying novel malaria vaccine candidate and drug target with clear functional understandings.
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