Intersubunit Mutational Effect on GIRK1 and GIRK4 Subunits

Indianapolis, IN

Malaria remains a global scourge to human life and existence and is responsible for up to 500 million cases and 3 million deaths annually. Therefore the need to establish and design novel malaria drugs and vaccines is crucial yet remains challenging, in part due to the current status of malaria gene annotations. While the human malaria (P. falciparum) genome deserves the majority of attention, the accuracy of the rodent model (P. yoelii) genome is imperative for the traditional pipeline of drug/vaccine development and validity studies. Our research utilizes published large-scale datasets, notably Expressed Sequence Tags (ESTs), comparative genomics, and bioinformatic approaches to resolve and correct the current P. yoelii gene annotations. Our research focused on the first 200 genes of the rodent malaria genome. Overall, 65% of all genes surveyed were incorrectly called as originally published. This presentation will offer both a description of our methodology and an update of results. Our data are currently available on the free online genomic resource, PlasmoDB (www.plasmodb.org). This work was funded by an NIH Academic Research Enhancement Award (R15 AI068675-01/02) and the Stephenson Fund.