Abstract
BackgroundThe Caribbean coast of Central America remains an area of malaria transmission caused by Plasmodium falciparum despite the fact that morbidity has been reduced in recent years. Parasite populations in that region show interesting characteristics such as chloroquine susceptibility and low mortality rates. Genetic structure and diversity of P. falciparum populations in the Honduras-Nicaragua border were analysed in this study.MethodsSeven neutral microsatellite loci were analysed in 110 P. falciparum isolates from endemic areas of Honduras (n = 77) and Nicaragua (n = 33), mostly from the border region called the Moskitia. Several analyses concerning the genetic diversity, linkage disequilibrium, population structure, molecular variance, and haplotype clustering were conducted.ResultsThere was a low level of genetic diversity in P. falciparum populations from Honduras and Nicaragua. Expected heterozigosity (He) results were similarly low for both populations. A moderate differentiation was revealed by the FST index between both populations, and two putative clusters were defined through a structure analysis. The main cluster grouped most of samples from Honduras and Nicaragua, while the second cluster was smaller and included all the samples from the Siuna community in Nicaragua. This result could partially explain the stronger linkage disequilibrium (LD) in the parasite population from that country. These findings are congruent with the decreasing rates of malaria endemicity in Central America.
Highlights
The Caribbean coast of Central America remains an area of malaria transmission caused by Plasmodium falciparum despite the fact that morbidity has been reduced in recent years
These and other simple sequence repeats (SSR) markers have been used to analyse the genetic structure of P. falciparum populations from almost every malarial region in the world, including Africa [17,36,37], Southeast Asia [8,18,38,39], Oceania [7], and South America [5,20,21]
Genetic diversity indexes and population structure of P. falciparum were determined in Honduras and Nicaragua using seven SSR neutral loci
Summary
The Caribbean coast of Central America remains an area of malaria transmission caused by Plasmodium falciparum despite the fact that morbidity has been reduced in recent years. During 2011, the largest number of cases occurred in countries that share the Amazon rainforest, such as Brazil, Colombia, Peru, and Venezuela, while in the Mesoamerica subregion malaria cases are concentrated in Honduras, Guatemala and Nicaragua, in descending order of importance [1] In those countries, less than 8% of malaria cases are caused by Plasmodium falciparum and the remaining cases are caused by Plasmodium vivax (based on data provided by National Health Ministries). Moskitia is a territory shared by Honduras and Nicaragua (Figure 1), with a tropical rainforest-dominant ecosystem and particular conditions concerning the epidemiology of the disease and social characteristics, such as extreme poverty, social inequity and low educational levels This region contributes most cases of infections by P. falciparum in Central America [2]. In spite of the relative small territory of Central American countries, cultural barriers (the human population of Moskitia is mostly indigenous Miskito, with their own language) and severe access problems tend to isolate Miskito communities from the rest of the society
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