Versatile, marker-free platform for life cycle-wide imaging of Plasmodium falciparum by integrating an exogenous gene cassette into a conserved intergenic locus
Takashi Sekine, Naoaki Shinzawa, Rie Kubota, Daisuke Kobayashi, Yawara Okubo, Kentaro Itokawa, Haruhiko Isawa, Hisako Amino, Tomoko Ishino · 2026
Read Versatile, marker-free platform for life cycle-wide imaging of Plasmodium falciparum by integrating an exogenous gene cassette into a conserved intergenic locus by Takashi Sekine, Naoaki Shinzawa, Rie Kubota, Daisuke Kobayashi, Yawara Okubo, Kentaro Itokawa, Haruhiko Isawa, Hisako Amino, Tomoko Ishino (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/PMC13547369.txt.
Description
Takashi Sekine and colleagues engineered in 2026 a malaria parasite line that glows red through its entire life cycle, giving researchers a window into stages that are usually hard to watch. Using gene editing, they slipped a fluorescent protein cassette into a quiet stretch of the Plasmodium falciparum genome without breaking any gene and without leaving a drug resistance marker behind. The edited line, named NF54-mCh, shines in blood stages, mosquito stages, and liver stages alike.
The parasites grew, formed sexual stages, and passed to mosquitoes normally, and their glow let the team spot infected mosquitoes without dissection. Sporozoites stayed infectious to humanized mouse livers. Similar lines worked in rodent malaria species. The authors offer the line as a parent platform for further genetic experiments.
Catalog record
| CREATOR | Takashi Sekine, Naoaki Shinzawa, Rie Kubota, Daisuke Kobayashi, Yawara Okubo, Kentaro Itokawa, Haruhiko Isawa, Hisako Amino, Tomoko Ishino |
|---|---|
| YEAR | 2026 |
| COLLECTION | PAPERS |
| FORMAT | TXT |
| FILE SIZE | 74907 |
| LICENSE | https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by/4.0 |
| RIGHTS | CC BY |
| SOURCE | Europe PMC |