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<0.001, one way ANOVA) and 3.5 versus 4.1 days (p<0.01, one way ANOVA) for mice receiving parasites by mosquito bites.

请注意，所有唾液腺（salivary glands）中子孢子（sporozoites）数量降低的疟原虫（野生型（Wild Type, WT）和冠状蛋白-mCherry（coronin-mCherry）组除外），经携带该类疟原虫的蚊虫叮咬后，均未能使所有被叮咬小鼠发生感染。尽管感染野生型或表达冠状蛋白-mCherry的疟原虫的蚊虫叮咬的小鼠全部（24/24）均被感染，但感染各类突变株疟原虫的蚊虫叮咬的小鼠中，仅78%（53/68）出现了红内期感染（blood stage infection）。鉴于一方面野生型、冠状蛋白-mCherry与R24A/R28A突变株的运动能力（motility）相近，另一方面其余所有突变株的运动能力也彼此相近（见表1），我们进一步分析了经蚊虫叮咬成功感染的小鼠的感染发生时间。因此，对于静脉内（intravenous, i.v.）注射疟原虫的小鼠，第一组（野生型、冠状蛋白-mCherry及R24A/R28A突变株组）的红内期感染平均发生时间为3.4天，第二组（其余突变株组）为3.9天（p<0.001，单因素方差分析（one way ANOVA））；而对于经蚊虫叮咬感染疟原虫的小鼠，两组的平均感染时间分别为3.5天与4.1天（p<0.01，单因素方差分析）。