Title

Potential Hemoglobin A/F role in clinical Malaria

Authors

Vikky Awasthi¹, Debprasad Chattopadhyay² & Jyoti Das^1*

Affiliation

¹Immunology Division, ICMR-National Institute of Malaria Research, Dwarka, New Delhi;

Present Address: Regional Medical Research Centre, Belagavi, Nehru Nagar, National Highway No.4, Belagavi-590010, Karnataka, India.

²ICMR Virus Unit, Calcutta, ID & BG Hospital, GB 4, Beliaghata, Kolkata, India;

Email

jyoti@mrcindia.org;

Article Type

Hypothesis

Date

Received August 5, 2017; Revised August 18, 2017; Accepted August 19, 2017; Published August 31, 2017

The Malarial parasite resides in the host RBC during its erythrocytic cycle. Plasmodium meets its entire nutritional requirement from RBC. It scavenges the hemoglobin of RBCs to meet its amino acid requirement. The host hemoglobin is made of different chains and it is dependent on age. Hemoglobin F (HbF), which has two-alpha and two gamma chain persists in children upto six years, and hemoglobin A (HbA) made of two alpha and two beta chains dominates. Therefore, it is of interest to compare the compositional features of HbA with HbF. Isoleucine is present in hemoglobin of children (gamma chain of HbF) while it is absent in adult hemoglobin (HbA). The presence of Isoleucine (I) makes HbF ideally suitable for the growth of parasite, as it does not have to depend upon the exogenous supply of the isoleucine, which might be responsible for making children more vulnerable to malaria as compared to adults.

Keywords

Hemoglobin, Plasmodium falciparum, Amino acids, Malaria

Citation

Awasthi et al. Bioinformation 13(8): 269-273 (2017)

Edited by

P Kangueane

ISSN

0973-2063

Publisher

Biomedical Informatics

License

This is an Open Access article which permits unrestricted use, distribution, and reproduction in any medium, provided the original work is properly credited. This is distributed under the terms of the Creative Commons Attribution License.