New Hybrid Protein Protects against Malaria

Lily Poor 
Mr. Gray 
Physics.1, Period: G 
May 21, 2017 

New Hybrid Protein Fights Off Malaria:

             Malaria is a dreadful disease that is carried in the Anopheles mosquito and transmitted through their bite. It is a life-threatening blood disease that can cause flu-like symptoms and possibly death. On the parasite is inside the body it multiplies itself in the liver before attacking the red blood cells. When it attacks the red blood cells it becomes a very dangerous disease. According to recent research in 2015, 222 million cases of Malaria occurred throughout our world. Of these 222 million cases, 429,000 people died, a majority of them being young children. Thankfully recent research has shown there may be a way to stop this disease!

              Scientists have recently found a new hybrid protein that makes it much more difficult for Malaria to enter red blood cells. On May 18, 2017, researchers and scientists published their most recent project of attempting to find something that will protect humans from the disease of Malaria. The researchers described that they have found a hybrid protein that protrudes from the red blood cell membrane. After many tests and experiments they discovered that this hybrid protein some how makes it much more difficult for Malaria to enter into the red blood cells.
            
              Researchers say that people who carry this hybrid protein are 30 to 50 percent less likely to be infected by the Malaria disease. Although the researchers and scientists who made this discovery still do not know how this hybrid protein works exactly, it will be of great help and can lead to developments of medication, etc.  As Dave Roberts, a malaria specialist at Oxford University said, although this recent discovering does not fully know why or how malaria can be stopped by the hybrid protein it, “may help us understand the pathological pathways by which the parasite causes so much disease”.  Malaria is an extreme problem in throughout Africa because many of the Anopheles Mosquitoes live there. This recent discovery attempted to do something other Malaria research groups have failed to do, use a wide variety of genomes and different DNA from various ethnic groups throughout Africa . This research team tested over 12000 genomes from all different areas in Africa such as, Gambia, Burkina Faso, Cameroon, Tanzania, Kenya and Malawi. This gave this research team a wide variety of different chromosomes to see what was the most efficient deter to Malaria. This is when they discovered the Dantu Antigen which is a hybrid between the protein A and protein B that sticks out from the red blood cells. This is the hybrid protein that protects red blood cells from being invaded by Malaria! 

                  

               Although this discovery did not reveal how this hybrid protein works to fight off Malaria, it is still certainly a significant discovery in the science world! This discovery will lead to many more discoveries and hopefully sometime soon, a cure or medication that will work efficiently to fight off the Malaria parasites!