Identification of Plasmodium vivax genes whose expression is spleen-dependent. Plasmodium vivax

The goal of this study is to identify P. vivax genes whose expression is dependent on the intact spleen in experimental infections in Aotus monkeys. Overall design: These studies were carried-out at the facilities of the “Fundación Centro de Primates de la Universidad del Valle”, Cali, Colombia and in the “Barcelona Centre for International Health Resarch” - CRESIB, Barcelona, Spain. This protocol was approved from the Ethical Committees of both Centres. A total of 4 Aotus lemurinus griseimembra naive animals were used in these experiments. Three animals were splenectomized whereas another had an intact spleen. A donor monkey was infected with P. vivax Sal-I strain and after peak parasitemias appeared a time-series infections into Sp-1, Sp-2, Sp-3, and Sp+2 animals were performed. Parasites from each infection were obtained from peripheral blood, monkey leukocytes were removed by MidMacs and only purified schizont stages were used for RNA extractions. Dual-hybridizations Cy3/Cy5 comparing the global expression of parasites obtained from different infections (Cy5) with a reference pool PvSp-1 obtained from splenectomized monkeys from CDC (PvSp-1) were perfomed using an Agilent's 60-mer platform representing the complete coding genome of P. vivax (1 oligonucleotide/2 kb coding sequences) GPL6667