Chemical Genetics to Study Plasmodium Kinases

Malaria is one of the major infectious diseases of the developing world that continues to spell havoc on mankind. There have been an estimated 584,000 deaths in 2013due to malaria infection. Although the disease is completely curable with the available drugs, the recent reports on emergence of resistance against the front line drug, artemisinin combination therapies in Southeast Asia is gravely worrisome. There is an urgent need to validate new drugs that can be used to control malaria infection and also novel targets that can be used in drug discovery programs against malaria.

Protein kinases have been well documented to play critical roles in almost all important physiological processes of eukaryotes and prokaryotes. They have been extensively used as drug targets to treat various human ailments including cancer. Since, protein kinases play indispensable roles in physiological processes inside a cell, studying their function using conventional gene knock-out approach may not be straight forward. Moreover, knock-down of protein levels using various post-transcriptional and post-translational approaches have their own limitations such as matching the exact timing of the knockdown in enzyme levels to the functional activity inside the cell, residual level of enzyme left and side-effects of the agent used for knock-down.  Read more................