The parasite that escaped out of Africa: Tracing origins of malaria parasite

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An international team of scientists has traced the origin of Plasmodium vivax, the second-worst malaria parasite of humans, to Africa, according to a study published this week in Nature Communications. Until recently, the closest genetic relatives of human P. vivax were found only in Asian macaques, leading researchers to believe that P. vivax originated in Asia.The study, led by researchers from the Perelman School of Medicine at the University of Pennsylvania, found that wild-living apes in central Africa are widely infected with parasites that, genetically, are nearly identical to human P. vivax.This finding overturns the dogma that P. vivax originated in Asia, despite being most prevalent in humans there now, and also solves other vexing questions about P. vivax infection: how a mutation conferring resistance to P. vivax occurs at high frequency in the very region where this parasite seems absent and how travelers returning from regions where almost all humans lack the receptor for P. vivax can be infected with this parasite.Of Ape and Human ParasitesMembers of the labs of Beatrice Hahn, MD, and George Shaw, MD, PhD, both professors of Medicine and Microbiology at Penn, in collaboration with Paul Sharp, PhD, an evolutionary biologist from the University of Edinburgh, and Martine Peeters, PhD, a microbiologist from the Institut de Recherche pour le Dveloppement and the University of Montpellier, tested over 5,000 ape fecal samples from dozens of field stations and sanctuaries in Africa for P. vivax DNA. …


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