A Greedy Promoter Controls Malarial Var-iations

Immune evasion by the malaria parasite Plasmodium falciparum is mediated by the mutually exclusive expression of a single member of the var family of genes, which encode variant surface antigens. In a recent paper in Nature, Voss et al. (2005) demonstrate that a construct carrying a transcriptionally active var promoter is sufficient to promote allelic exclusion of the parasite's endogenous var gene