Vendrely, K. | Search bioRxiv

bioRxiv2020

Bulk Segregant Approaches to Nutritional Genomics in Plasmodium falciparum

What genes determine growth and nutrient utilization in asexual blood-stage malaria parasites? Competition experiments between a lab-adapted African parasite (NF54), and a recently isolated Asian parasite (NHP4026) reveal contrasting outcomes in different media: NF54 outcompetes NHP4026 in media containing human serum, while NHP4026 outcompetes NF54 in media containing AlbuMAX, a lipid-rich bovine serum formulation. We conducted parasite genetic crosses and compared genome-wide allele frequency changes in progeny populations cultured in media containing serum or AlbuMAX: this bulk segregant analysis (BSA) reveals three quantitative trait loci (QTL) underlying differential growth. The strongest QTL (chromosome 13) contains EBA-140: competition experiments between EBA-140-knockout and isogenic wildtype parasites showed fitness reversals in the two media types, validating this locus as the causative gene. These results (i) demonstrate the effectiveness of BSA for dissecting fitness traits in Plasmodium falciparum, and (ii) reveal an intimate link between red blood cell invasion and nutrient composition of growth media.

genetics↗

bioRxiv2020

Cyclical Regression Covariates remove the major confounding effect of cyclical developmental gene expression with strain-specific drug response in the malaria parasite Plasmodium falciparum

BackgroundThe cyclical nature of parasite gene expression in the intraerythrocytic development cycle (IDC) in human blood confounds the accurate detection of specific transcriptional differences due to drug resistance in Plasmodium falciparum. Here, we propose the use of cyclical regression covariates to eliminate the major confounding of developmentally driven transcriptional changes with changes due to drug response. We show that elimination of this confounding can reduce both Type I and Type II errors, and demonstrate the effect of approach on real data. ResultsWe apply this method to two publicly available datasets, and demonstrate its ability to reduce the potential confounding of differences in expression due the species-specific intraerythrocytic development cycle from strain-specific differences in drug response. We show that the application of cyclical regression covariates has minimal impact on the pool of transcripts identified as significantly different in a dataset generated from single timepoint clinical blood samples with low variance for developmental stage and a profound impact on another clinical data set with more variance among the samples for developmental stage. ConclusionsCyclical regression covariates have immediate application to studies where in-vitro synchronization of all samples to the same developmental timepoint is not feasible, primarily parasite transcriptome sequencing direct from clinical blood samples, a widely used approach to frontline detection of emerging drug resistance.

genomics↗