BPCPPDYSOE21 – wissenschaftliches Programm
Bereiche | Tage | Auswahl | Suche | Aktualisierungen | Downloads | Hilfe
BP: Fachverband Biologische Physik
BP 24: Poster B: Active Biological Matter, Cell Mechanics, Systems Biology, Computational Biophysics, etc.
BP 24.47: Poster
Dienstag, 23. März 2021, 16:00–18:30, BPp
Analyzing the replication dynamics of malaria parasites — •Patrick Binder1,2,3, Severina Klaus4, Thomas Höfer3, Nils Becker3, Ulrich Schwarz2,3, and Markus Ganter4 — 1Institute for Theoretical Physics, Heidelberg University, Germany — 2BioQuant, Heidelberg University, Germany — 3German Cancer Research Center (DKFZ), Heidelberg, Germany — 4Center for Infectious Diseases, Heidelberg University Hospital, Heidelberg, Germany,
At around 200 million cases and half a million of fatalities each year, malaria remains a global health challenge. The predominant malaria-causing pathogen Plasmodium falciparum is a eukaryotic parasite with a complex life cycle that includes proliferation within red blood cells. After invasion, the parasite undergoes several rounds of nuclear division, eventually releasing around 24 daughter parasites into the blood. Intriguingly, the nuclei divide asynchronously although they reside in a shared cytoplasm. It is unknown how this process is controlled to yield a well-controlled and well-timed final outcome. We investigate the regulation of DNA replication and nuclear division by confronting simple stochastic branching models with high-resolution time-lapse confocal microscopy. We first found that successive rounds of replication speed up initially and slow down later on. Second, termination of replication is regulated by a counter mechanism and not a timer. Third, DNA replication is less synchronous than in stochastic lineages of mother-daughter correlated nuclei or even independent nuclei. Together, our analysis discovered the unusual mode of replication of a major human pathogen.