<i>Plasmodium falciparum</i> or Malaria is a potentially lethal pathogen spread through mosquitoes in tropical areas. There are between 300 and 600 million new cases of Malaria each year, resulting with close to a million deaths, mainly in children younger than 5. Many drugs have been available to try to combat this disease, one of which is Chloroquine. This drug worked well for several years, and showed signs of inducing apoptosis in the parasite, which is a form of programmed cell death (PCD), found in just about every multicellular organism as a way to control the population. Very few single celled organisms carry this pathway due to fundamental evolutionary logic. The release of a protein called cytochrome c from the mitochondria into the rest of the cell starts a cascade of reactions that eventually lead to PCD. Apoptosis has been reported in the ookynete life cycle stage, but nothing has been proven in the blood portion of the life cycle. This project is focused on using recombinant malarial cytochrome c to confirm a putative apoptosis pathway. In order to test the involvement of cytochrome c we need to measure the protease activity using a fluorogenic substrate in a parasite lysate under increasing concentrations of protein. Data on the purification of recombinant cytochrome c protein using affinity chromatography towards a MBP (Maltose Binding Protein) tag will be presented.

Development of maltose binding protein purification for cytochrome c

2019 Spring National Meeting

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