A Library of Functional Recombinant Cell-surface and Secreted P. falciparum

Malaria, an infectious disease caused by parasites of the Plasmodium genus, is one of the world’s major public health concerns causing up to a million deaths annually, mostly because of P. falciparum infections. All of the clinical symptoms are associated with the blood stage of the disease, an obligate part of the parasite life cycle, when a form of the parasite called the merozoite recog-nizes and invades host erythrocytes. During erythrocyte invasion, merozoites are directly exposed to the host hu-moral immune system making the blood stage of the parasite a conceptually attractive therapeutic target. Pro-gress in the functional and molecular characterization of P. falciparum merozoite proteins, however, has been hampered by the technical challenges associated with expressing these proteins in a biochemically active re