Prudêncio Miguel, Rodrigues Cristina D, Ataíde Ricardo, Mota Maria M
Unidade de Malária, Instituto de Medicina Molecular, Universidade de Lisboa, 1649-028 Lisboa, Portugal.
Cell Microbiol. 2008 Jan;10(1):218-24. doi: 10.1111/j.1462-5822.2007.01032.x. Epub 2007 Aug 14.
The study of the liver stage of malaria has been hampered by limitations in the experimental approaches required to effectively dissect and quantify hepatocyte infection by Plasmodium. Here, we report on the use of flow cytometry, in conjunction with GFP-expressing Plasmodium sporozoites, to assess the various steps that constitute a successful malaria liver infection: cell traversal, hepatocyte invasion and intrahepatocyte parasite development. We show that this rapid, efficient and inexpensive method can be used to overcome current limitations in the independent quantification of those steps, facilitating routine or large-scale studies of host-pathogen molecular interactions.
疟原虫肝脏期的研究一直受到有效剖析和量化疟原虫肝细胞感染所需实验方法局限性的阻碍。在此，我们报告了利用流式细胞术，结合表达绿色荧光蛋白（GFP）的疟原虫子孢子，来评估构成成功疟疾肝脏感染的各个步骤：细胞穿越、肝细胞入侵以及肝内寄生虫发育。我们表明，这种快速、高效且廉价的方法可用于克服目前这些步骤独立量化方面的局限性，便于对宿主 - 病原体分子相互作用进行常规或大规模研究。
