Greenbaum Doron C
Department of Pharmacology, School of Medicine, University of Pennsylvania, PA 19104, USA.
Trends Pharmacol Sci. 2008 Feb;29(2):51-6. doi: 10.1016/j.tips.2007.11.008. Epub 2008 Jan 15.
Malaria is a global disease, causing at least 500 million clinical cases and more than one million deaths each year. Moreover, drug-resistant Plasmodium falciparum, the organism that causes most malaria-associated deaths, has become a major problem. Therefore, discovery and investigation of novel targets for anti-malarial drug design is essential to combat this disease. The malarial genome has been sequenced, revealing approximately 5500 genes. The current post-genomic challenge is functionally to evaluate the essential genes and validate them for therapeutic design. Unfortunately, standard genetics techniques are limited in scope because of low transfection efficiency and a lack of knockdown techniques, thereby rendering the analysis of essential genes difficult.
疟疾是一种全球性疾病，每年导致至少5亿例临床病例和100多万人死亡。此外，导致大多数疟疾相关死亡的耐药恶性疟原虫已成为一个主要问题。因此，发现和研究抗疟药物设计的新靶点对于抗击这种疾病至关重要。疟原虫基因组已被测序，揭示了大约5500个基因。当前的后基因组挑战是从功能上评估必需基因并验证它们用于治疗设计。不幸的是，由于转染效率低和缺乏敲低技术，标准遗传学技术的范围有限，从而使得对必需基因的分析变得困难。
