Malaria, one of the oldest diseases known to man, has shown no
signs of slowing down as it ages. More than 1 million children
die from malaria in sub-Saharan Africa each year, and in areas
along the Thailand/Cambodian border multiple drug-resistant
strains of the disease are becoming commonplace. With the
previously mainstay antimalarial drug chloroquine nearly
ineffective due to drug resistance and traditional public health
approaches such as mosquito netting offering uneven results, two
new papers by University of Notre Dame biologist Michael Ferdig
suggest that the means of combating this old foe may lie in the
new tools of genomics and bioinformatics. In the papers, Ferdig
points out that development of the malaria parasite Plasmodium
falciparum in the blood is driven by a number of different genes
expressed at different times and at different levels. Exactly
what influences such transcriptional changes remains elusive,
particularly in regard to important phenotypes like drug
resistance. Ferdig and his co