Has the time come for us to complement our malaria parasites?

Abstract

Genetic modification of malaria parasites is becoming more facile and the range of available manipulations is slowly increasing. Depending on the species, we can now do single and double crossover homologous recombination [1], regulated expression modulated at the replication, transcription or protein stability levels [2], stage-specific recombination [3] and transposon insertion [4–6]. The number of gene knockouts reported in the literature is now in the hundreds [7], many with interesting phenotypes that inform on gene function.