Monika Saini, Che Julius Ngwa, Manisha Marothia, Pritee Verma, Shakeel Ahmad, Jyoti Kumari, Sakshi Anand, Vandana Vandana, Bharti Goyal, Soumyananda Chakraborti, Kailash C Pandey, Swati Garg, Soumya Pati, Anand Ranganathan, Gabriele Pradel, Shailja Singh
Prohibitins (PHBs) are highly conserved pleiotropic proteins as they have been shown to mediate key cellular functions. Here, we characterize PHBs encoding putative genes of Plasmodium falciparum by exploiting different orthologous models. We demonstrated that PfPHB1 (PF3D7_0829200) and PfPHB2 (PF3D7_1014700) are expressed in asexual and sexual blood stages of the parasite. Immunostaining indicated these proteins as mitochondrial residents as they were found to be localized as branched structures. We further validated PfPHBs as organellar proteins residing in Plasmodium mitochondria, where they interact with each other...
April 21, 2023: Biochemical Pharmacology