RNA-seq of the malaria parasite Plasmodium falciparum 3D7 during its intraerythrocytic development cycle

The parasite Plasmodium falciparum is responsible for severe malaria, which is still one of the major causes of death in developing countries. To provide a new RNA-seq reference dataset for its blood-stage transcriptome according to current guidelines and best practices, we performed a time course experiment with three independent biological replicates of synchronized P. falciparum 3D7 cells, that were cultivated at a haematocrit of 5% in human O+ erythrocytes. RNA-seq samples were taken at 8 developmental stages including young ring stage (8 hpi), late ring stage/early trophozoite (16 hpi), mid-age trophozoite (24 hpi), late trophozoite (32 hpi), early schizont (40 hpi), schizont (44 hpi), late schizont (48 hpi) and purified merozoites (0 hpi). Red blood cell pellets were lysed with Trizol and total RNA was purified using column-based purification (PureLink RNA Kit) including DNase treatment on the column and controlling for absence of genomic DNA contamination using qPCR. Whole blood total RNA samples were depleted of human globin mRNA using magnetic bead isolation technology (GLOBINclear kit). After RNA sample quality control and optimized cDNA libraries preparation for AT-biased genomes for Illumina sequencing, RNA-seq was performed at BGI Genomics (Shenzhen, China) on HiSeq 4000 to generate 100 bp paired-end sequencing reads.