Modeling the malaria parasite-mosquito midgut cell interactions

Many in-vitro and in-vivo experiments had been performed to elucidate the interaction between mosquito and the malaria parasites (Baton et al., In Programmed Cell Death in Protozoa, Edited by Martin P. Landes Bioscience, Springer, 2007; Garver et al., In Insect Immunology, Edited by Nancy Beckage, Elsevier, 2007; Osta et al., Journal of Experimental Biology, 207, 2551-2563, 2004) and findings have shown that in and at the wall of the mid-gut (henceforth, in/at the mid-gut) of the mosquitoes, a number of the malaria parasites at this crucial life cycle died; while a number of them survive and move to the next stage of their life cycle that enable them to infect the human (the vertebrate host) with the malaria disease. In this work, we model using Agent Based Modeling (henceforth, ABM)(Mansury et al., Journal of theor. Biol. 219, 343-370, 2002), how factors in in/at the mid-gut of the mosquito can be enhanced to enable the mosquito immune system destroys all the malaria parasites (the mosquito plays host to) at this crucial stage of their life cycle. The results of this work will be useful for the development of a novel chemotherapy strategy for transmission blocking of the malaria parasites in/at the mid-gut of the mosquito.

Oral presentation #45