Extracellular vesicles participate in proteostasis and heat shock adaptation in Plasmodium falciparum
Yunuen Avalos-Padilla, Lucía Román-Álamo, Inés Bouzón-Arnáiz, Elsa M. Arce, Diego Muñoz-Torrero, Xavier Fernàndez-Busquets · 2026
Read Extracellular vesicles participate in proteostasis and heat shock adaptation in Plasmodium falciparum by Yunuen Avalos-Padilla, Lucía Román-Álamo, Inés Bouzón-Arnáiz, Elsa M. Arce, Diego Muñoz-Torrero, Xavier Fernàndez-Busquets (2026) in the Tower of Babel, a free online library of public-domain works preserved in clean, searchable text. No sign-up. The full text is served as a plain-text file at a predictable URL, where text is present: https://antarctic-labs.com/tower-of-babel/PMC13312847.txt.
Description
Yunuen Avalos-Padilla and co-authors uncover, in a 2026 study, an unsuspected survival trick the malaria parasite Plasmodium falciparum uses when fever strikes. Human malaria brings repeated heat shocks above 40 degrees, a protein-damaging stress the parasite must survive, and its defense was thought to rest on chaperone proteins alone.
The team disabled PfVps60, a protein of the ESCRT machinery that sorts cargo into vesicles, and watched what changed under heat. Nearly half the proteins found in the parasite's released vesicles matched a known aggregation-prone set. Without the sorting protein, vesicles failed to export key chaperones, protein clumps piled up in the wrong place, and parasites died early after heat shock. Feeding the mutants vesicles from heat-stressed normal parasites partly restored their tolerance. The authors cast stress vesicles as a shared lifeline and a possible drug target.
Catalog record
| CREATOR | Yunuen Avalos-Padilla, Lucía Román-Álamo, Inés Bouzón-Arnáiz, Elsa M. Arce, Diego Muñoz-Torrero, Xavier Fernàndez-Busquets |
|---|---|
| YEAR | 2026 |
| COLLECTION | PAPERS |
| FORMAT | TXT |
| FILE SIZE | 69705 |
| LICENSE | https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by/4.0 |
| RIGHTS | CC BY |
| SOURCE | Europe PMC |