Comparison of the different parasite strains for their growth within cultured liver cells and their infectivity for mice.

Note that all parasites with a lowered number of sporozoites in their salivary glands (all but WT and coronin-mCherry) failed to infect all mice following mosquito bites. While 100% (24 out of 24) of the mice bitten by mosquitoes infected with either wild type or coronin-mCherry expressing parasites were infected, only 78% (53 out of 68) of the mice bitten by mosquitoes infected with the various mutants developed a blood stage infection. As the motility was similar between WT, coronin-mCherry and the R24A/R28A mutant on one hand and between all the other mutants on the other hand (Table 1), we further analyzed the time to infection of mice successfully infected by mosquitoes. Hence, the first group showed an average time to blood stage infection of 3.4 days and the second group of 3.9 days for i.v. injected parasites (p