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PfMORC protein regulates chromatin accessibility and transcriptional repression in the human malaria parasite, Plasmodium falciparum.

Zeinab M Chahine | Mohit Gupta | Todd Lenz | Thomas Hollin | Steven Abel | Charles Banks | Anita Saraf | Jacques Prudhomme | Suhani Bhanvadia | Laurence A Florens | Karine G Le Roch
eLife | 2024

The environmental challenges the human malaria parasite, Plasmodium falciparum, faces during its progression into its various lifecycle stages warrant the use of effective and highly regulated access to chromatin for transcriptional regulation. Microrchidia (MORC) proteins have been implicated in DNA compaction and gene silencing across plant and animal kingdoms. Accumulating evidence has shed light on the role MORC protein plays as a transcriptional switch in apicomplexan parasites. In this study, using the CRISPR/Cas9 genome editing tool along with complementary molecular and genomics approaches, we demonstrate that PfMORC not only modulates chromatin structure and heterochromatin formation throughout the parasite erythrocytic cycle, but is also essential to the parasite survival. Chromatin immunoprecipitation followed by deep sequencing (ChIP-seq) experiments suggests that PfMORC binds to not only sub-telomeric regions and genes involved in antigenic variation but may also play a role in modulating stage transition. Protein knockdown experiments followed by chromatin conformation capture (Hi-C) studies indicate that downregulation of PfMORC impairs key histone marks and induces the collapse of the parasite heterochromatin structure leading to its death. All together these findings confirm that PfMORC plays a crucial role in chromatin structure and gene regulation, validating this factor as a strong candidate for novel antimalarial strategies.

Pubmed ID: 39636094

Associated grants

  • Agency: NIAID NIH HHS, United States
    Id: R01 AI136511
  • Agency: NIAID NIH HHS, United States
    Id: R21 AI142506
  • Agency: NIH HHS, United States
    Id: S10 OD026929
  • Agency: University of California, Riverside,
    Id: NIFA-Hatch-225935

Publication data is provided by the National Library of Medicine ® and PubMed ®. Data is retrieved from PubMed ® on a weekly schedule. For terms and conditions see the National Library of Medicine Terms and Conditions.

This is a list of tools and resources that we have found mentioned in this publication.


GATK (tool)

RRID:SCR_001876

A software package to analyze next-generation resequencing data. The toolkit offers a wide variety of tools, with a primary focus on variant discovery and genotyping as well as strong emphasis on data quality assurance. Its robust architecture, powerful processing engine and high-performance computing features make it capable of taking on projects of any size. This software library makes writing efficient analysis tools using next-generation sequencing data very easy, and second it's a suite of tools for working with human medical resequencing projects such as 1000 Genomes and The Cancer Genome Atlas. These tools include things like a depth of coverage analyzers, a quality score recalibrator, a SNP/indel caller and a local realigner. (entry from Genetic Analysis Software)

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SAMTOOLS (tool)

RRID:SCR_002105

Original SAMTOOLS package has been split into three separate repositories including Samtools, BCFtools and HTSlib. Samtools for manipulating next generation sequencing data used for reading, writing, editing, indexing,viewing nucleotide alignments in SAM,BAM,CRAM format. BCFtools used for reading, writing BCF2,VCF, gVCF files and calling, filtering, summarising SNP and short indel sequence variants. HTSlib used for reading, writing high throughput sequencing data.

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BEDTools (tool)

RRID:SCR_006646

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Sickle (tool)

RRID:SCR_006800

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RRID:SCR_008426

Commercial instrument and chemical vendor. Developer and manufacturer of specialized technological products for life science research and clinical diagnostics markets.

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RRID:SCR_008983

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RRID:SCR_011848

Software Java pipeline for trimming tasks for Illumina paired end and single ended data. Flexible Trimmer for Illumina Sequence Data. Pair aware preprocessing tool optimized for Illumina next generation sequencing data. Includes several processing steps for read trimming and filtering. Operating systems Unix/Linux, Mac OS, Windows.

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SAM format (tool)

RRID:SCR_012093

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Abcam (tool)

RRID:SCR_012931

A commercial antibody supplier which supplies primary and secondary antibodies, biochemicals, proteins, peptides, lysates, immunoassays and other kits.

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PlasmoDB (tool)

RRID:SCR_013331

Functional genomic database for malaria parasites. Database for Plasmodium spp. Provides resource for data analysis and visualization in gene-by-gene or genome-wide scale. PlasmoDB 5.5 contains annotated genomes, evidence of transcription, proteomics evidence, protein function evidence, population biology and evolution data. Data can be queried by selecting from query grid or drop down menus. Results can be combined with each other on query history page. Search results can be downloaded with associated functional data and registered users can store their query history for future retrieval or analysis.Key community database for malaria researchers, intersecting many types of laboratory and computational data, aggregated by gene.

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HISAT2 (tool)

RRID:SCR_015530

Graph-based alignment of next generation sequencing reads to a population of genomes.

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DESeq2 (tool)

RRID:SCR_015687

Software package for differential gene expression analysis based on the negative binomial distribution. Used for analyzing RNA-seq data for differential analysis of count data, using shrinkage estimation for dispersions and fold changes to improve stability and interpretability of estimates.

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