Worldwide sequence conservation of transmission-blocking vaccine candidate Pvs230 in Plasmodium vivax
By M. Doi, K. Tanabe, Shin-Ichiro Tachibana, M. Hamai, M. Tachibana, Toshihiro Mita, M. Yagi, F. Zeyrek, M. U. Ferreira, H. Ohmae and 7 more. 2011
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Pfs230, surface protein of gametocyte/gamete of the human malaria parasite, Plasmodium falciparum, is a prime candidate of malaria transmission-blocking vaccine. P. vivax has an ortholog of Pfs230 (Pvs230), however, there has been no study in any aspects on Pvs230 to date. To investigate whether Pvs230 can be a vivax malaria transmission-blocking vaccine, we performed evolutionary and population genetic analysis of the Pvs230 gene (pvs230: PVX_003905). Our analysis of Pvs230 and its orthologs in seven Plasmodium species revealed two distinctive parts: an interspecies variable part (IVP) containing species-specific oligopeptide repeats at the N-terminus and a 7.5 kb interspecies conserved part (ICP) containing 14 cysteine-rich domains. Pvs230 was closely related to its orthologs, Pks230 and Pcys230, in monkey malaria parasites. Analysis of 113 pvs230 sequences obtained from worldwide, showed that nucleotide diversity is remarkably low in the non-repeat 8-kb region of pvs230 (θπ = 0.00118) with 77 polymorphic nucleotide sites, 40 of which resulting in amino acid replacements. A signature of purifying selection but not of balancing selection was seen on pvs230. Functional and/or structural constraints may limit the level of polymorphism in pvs230. The observed limited polymorphism in pvs230 should ground for utilization of Pvs230 as an effective transmission-blocking vaccine.
Subfields: Immunology, Oncology, Public Health, Environmental and Occupational Health
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Citations in the corpus
- The s48/45 six-cysteine proteins: mediators of interaction throughout the Plasmodium life cycle (2016, background): “The analysis of 113 Pvs230 sequences from around the world showed that it also is under purifying selection with very low nucleotide diversity (Doi et al., 2011; Tachibana et al., 2011).”