Conservation of gene essentiality in Apicomplexa and its

New anti-malarial drugs are needed to address the challenge of artemisinin resistance and to achieve malaria elimination and eradication. Target-based screening of inhibitors is a major approach for drug discovery, but its application to malaria has been limited by the availability of few validated drug targets in . Here we utilize the recently available large-scale gene Plasmodium essentiality data in and a related apicomplexan pathogen, Plasmodium berghei to identify potential anti-malarial drug targets. We find Toxoplasma gondii, significant conservation of gene essentiality in the two apicomplexan parasites. The conservation of essentiality could be used to prioritize enzymes that are essential across the two parasites and show no or low sequence similarity to human proteins. Novel essential genes in could be predicted Plasmodium based on their essentiality in . Essential genes in showed T. gondii Plasmodium higher expression, evolutionary conservation and association with specific functional classes. We expect that the availability of a large number of novel potential drug targets would significantly accelerate anti-malarial drug discovery. Gajinder Pal Singh ( ) Corresponding author: [email protected] Singh GP. How to cite this article: Conservation of gene essentiality in Apicomplexa and its application for prioritization of anti-malarial 2017, :23 (doi: ) drug targets [version 1; referees: 2 approved with reservations] F1000Research 6 10.12688/f1000research.10559.1 © 2017 Singh GP. This is an open access article distributed under the terms of the , which Copyright: Creative Commons Attribution Licence permits unrestricted use, distribution, and reproduction in any medium, provided the original work is properly cited. Data associated with the article are available under the terms of the (CC0 1.0 Public domain dedication). Creative Commons Zero "No rights reserved" data waiver The work is supported by an Early Career Fellowship to G.P.S. by the Wellcome Trust/DBT India Alliance (IA/E/15/1/502297). Grant information: The funders had no role in study design, data collection and analysis, decision to publish, or preparation of the manuscript. Competing interests: No competing interests were disclosed. 09 Jan 2017, :23 (doi: ) First published: 6 10.12688/f1000research.10559.1 Referee Status: