Comparison of the Compositional Proclivities of the Complete Genomes of Plasmodium Falciparum and Human

Pathogens and hosts have a dynamic relationship, one that is ever changing at the molecular level - the pathogen influencing the evolutionary path of the host and the host influencing the evolutionary path of the pathogen. The pathogen’s adaptation to a particular host could serve several purposes, e.g. to mimic the host to avoid detection, to take advantage of the host’s cellular machinery, to increase virulence, etc. Recognizing these adaptations is far from trivial, particularly when the size of the pathogen’s and host’s genomes differ by orders of magnitudes. Novel algorithms and data structures have been developed in our laboratory that make it possible to quantify the “distance” (or number of mutations) separating pathogen and host sequences. Through the examination of these distances, we hypothesize that it is possible to monitor pathogen adaptations at the sequence level and further our understanding of the function of the pathogen machinery. Even though the genome of Plasmodium falciparum, the agent causing malaria in humans, is complete, the functions of many of the coding regions remain unknown. Herein we present the results of our exhaustive calculations for each of the annotated coding regions in P. falciparum and the human genome