Plasmodium falciparum blood stage parasites: control vs PfTRF-depleted parasites

Transcriptional profiling of transgenic Plasmodium falciparum blood stage parasites expressing the telomere repeat-binding factor PfTRF as a C-terminal GFP-DD fusion (3D7/TRFGFP-ON). The DD (FKBP destabilisation domain) allows for the conditional depletion of fusion proteins in absence of the stabilising ligand Shield-1 (Banaszynski LA, Chen LC, Maynard-Smith LA, Ooi AG, Wandless TJ. A rapid, reversible, and tunable method to regulate protein function in living cells using synthetic small molecules.Cell. 2006 Sep 8;126(5):995-1004). The goal of this experiment was to identify genes differentially expressed in response to PfTRF depletion. P. falciparum strain 3D7 parasites expressing endogenous PfTRF-GFP-DD were grown in presence of 4nM WR/625nM Shield-1 (3D7/TRFGFP-ON) or 4nM WR (3D7/TRFGFP-OFF). RNA extracted from these samples at four (3D7/TRFGFP-ON) and five (3D7/TRFGFP-OFF) consecutive time points each was processed for microarray analysis.