Cloning Of Plasmodium Vivax DNA And Its Application In Genetic Diagnosis Of Malaria

Control of malaria represnets a major challenge, as approximately one third of the world's population may be exposed to the risk of malaria infection with more than 100 million cases per year. Plasmodium vivax, the causative agent of benign tertian malaria, is the dominant species of this parasite in China, the Middle East and Central America. Although causing much less mortality than P. falciparum, vivax malaria. with its characteristic relapsing fevers. is a serious disease. The control, prophylaxis and eventual eradication of malaria depends on the availability of sensitive. simple, and inexpensive diagnositic means of detecting parasites in order to identify foci of infection and to evaluate the effect of various control programs.Malaria can be diagnosed either by direct microscopic examination of blood smears, which is time consuming and requires experts, or by immunological techniques, which do not accurately discriminate between past and present infections. At present. DNA probes have been developed for malaria diagnosis, which are sensitivity and specificity, and suitable to epidemiological surveys of malaria and Classfication of plasmodium strains.So far, efforts to develop DNA probes for diagnosis have concentrated on P. falciparum and almost all of probes have been labelled with ³²P which is disadvantage for epidemiological investigations of malaria.In this study, the erythrocytes infected with P. vivax were seperated from infected patient's blood by Percoll gradient centrifugation. A P. vivax genomic DNA library was constructed using pUC12 vector and differentially screened by colony hybridization using ³²P-labelled nick translated human DNA, P. vivax DNA or P. falciparum DNA, respectively. A approximate 300 bp...