Abstract
Advances in research over the past few decades have greatly improved metabolomics-based approaches in studying parasite biology and disease etiology. This improves the investigation of varied metabolic requirements during life stages or when following transmission to their hosts, and fulfills the demand for improved diagnostics and precise therapeutics. Therefore, this review highlights the progress of metabolomics in malaria research, including metabolic mapping of Plasmodium vertebrate life cycle stages to investigate antimalarials mode of actions and underlying complex host-parasite interactions. Also, we discuss current limitations as well as make several practical suggestions for methodological improvements which could drive metabolomics progress for malaria from a comprehensive perspective.
Highlights
Reviewed by: Xing-Quan Zhu, Chinese Academy of Agricultural Sciences, China Liang Shaohui, Wenzhou Medical University, China
The advances in metabolomics during the past few decades have opened the door for a deeper biological understanding of the critical metabolic profile in Plasmodium spp
Globally captured drugrelated response has turned out to be helpful in the understanding of novel or unexpected mode of actions (MoAs), further facilitating their clinical use, including the optimization of dose and pharmacokinetics, guiding the selection of partner drugs for combating the emergence of resistances
Summary
Given that for in vitro culture, the malaria parasites mainly reside inside of host erythrocytes, how can the quality of metabolomics data be improved to reduce unnecessary background noise owing to extremely high sensitivity for metabolomics platforms?. With the urgent demands for better understanding of the molecular biology of the malaria parasite (Miller et al, 2013), system biology has been proven to be a versatile and robust strategy to explore the complex Plasmodium biological process (Hasin et al, 2017; Karczewski and Snyder, 2018; Box 1) Advances in these omics-based approaches have shed light on parasite biology and further revolutionized the research for parasitic diseases (Figure 2; Florens et al, 2002; Gardner et al, 2002; Zhu et al, 2018). Untargeted metabolomics As a hypothesis generating strategy, it mainly focuses on the global assessment of a broad range of both known and unknown compounds to offer either comprehensive or unbiased approaches to investigate unanticipated perturbations Using this unbiased strategy, changes of metabolic profiles subjected to different conditions can be revealed, leading to the identification of novel metabolites or metabolic pathways.
Sign-in/Register to view highlights & summary Sign-in/Register to access full text options 
Talk to us
Join us for a 30 min session where you can share your feedback and ask us any queries you have
Schedule a callDisclaimer: All third-party content on this website/platform is and will remain the property of their respective owners and is provided on "as is" basis without any warranties, express or implied. Use of third-party content does not indicate any affiliation, sponsorship with or endorsement by them. Any references to third-party content is to identify the corresponding services and shall be considered fair use under The CopyrightLaw.
