SKM 2023 – wissenschaftliches Programm

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BP: Fachverband Biologische Physik

BP 11: Poster Session I

BP 11.18: Poster

Dienstag, 28. März 2023, 12:30–15:30, P1

Sequential resource-sharing speeds up replication in Plasmodium falciparum — •Patrick Binder^{1, 2}, Severina Klaus³, Markus Ganter³, Ulrich S. Schwarz², Thomas Höfer¹, and Nils B. Becker¹ — ¹German Cancer Research Center (DKFZ), Heidelberg — ²Institute for Theoretical Physics and BioQuant, Heidelberg University — ³Center for Infectious Diseases, Heidelberg University Hospital

The malaria-causing pathogen Plasmodium falciparum is a eukaryotic parasite with a complex life cycle that includes proliferation within red blood cells. After invasion of a red blood cell, the parasite undergoes several rounds of nuclear division and after two days releases around 20 daughter parasites. Although nuclei reside in a shared cytoplasm, using fluorescent imaging, we observe that these cycles desynchronize during multiplication, and do so more rapidly than expected for independent nuclei. To explain the observed asynchrony, we introduce a branching model for allocation of a shared enzyme to the different nuclei. The model encompasses parallel and sequential DNA replication modes. We find that when the shared enzyme is limiting, a sequential replication utilizes resources more efficiently than parallel, which result in faster completion of nuclear multiplication. Overall, our findings suggest that Plasmodium falciparum has evolved optimal resource utilization by exploiting a sequential sharing of replication machinery.