Allelic variations in putative antimalarial drug resistance and vaccine candidate genes among Plasmodium vivax reference genomes

Vineeta Singh ^* Suman Tamang Aditi Arya

• Indian Council of Medical Research (ICMR), New Delhi, India

Objectives: Plasmodium vivax (P. vivax) is the most widespread Plasmodium spp. globally and the second most common cause of human malaria but very little is known about its biology due to lack of continuous in-vitro/ex-vivo culture. In such circumstances, genomic studies provides an alternative for comprehending biology of P. vivax parasites. Till date, most of P. vivax genomic studies are based on Sal-I as a reference genome, but with recent release of PvP01 and PvW1 reference genomes with higher quality and improved assemblies following continual improvements in annotation, adopting these genomes as a reference for genomic studies seem more advantageous. In this study, allelic differences in putative antimalarial drug resistance, vaccine candidate genes with assembly features of these three genomes were analysed and summarized.Methods: Nucleotide and amino acid sequences of five P. vivax putative antimalarial drug resistance and three vaccine candidate genes for all three references (Sal-I, PvP01, and PvW1), were retrieved from PlasmoDB and aligned together using MEGA11. Any differences in nucleotide and codon sequences between the genomes were noted.Results: Various allelic differences in putative antimalarial drug resistance and vaccine candidate genes among three references were observed, which include the positions previously identified as candidate marker for these gene variants.Conclusions: Since antimalarial drug resistance genotyping studies rely on candidate genetic markers to classify resistant or sensitive parasites, knowledge of allelic differences is important among references. Likewise, the heterogeneity of vaccine candidate genes should be taken into account while designing vaccines for P. vivax.