Characterization of the malaria parasite <i>Plasmodium falciparum</i> Tepsin homolog
Bibliographic record
Abstract
ABSTRACT Plasmodium parasites rely on the invasion of human erythrocytes for their survival. This invasion process is facilitated by specialized organelles (rhoptry, micronemes, and dense granules) housed within a distinctive structure known as the apical complex. How the apical complex is generated is still enigmatic, especially how specificity is achieved in the vesicular trafficking between the Golgi apparatus and the apical organelles, but phosphoinositide lipids might potentially be involved. Here, we describe the characterization of a putative phosphoinositide-binding protein containing an Epsin NH 2 -terminal homology (ENTH) domain, Pf3D7_1459600. We show that this protein is structurally homologous to human Tepsin. Surprisingly, unlike other Tepsins, the ENTH domain of PfTepsin binds non-specifically to phosphoinositides in vitro , potentially through a positively charged pocket. Colocalization assays revealed that PfTepsin potentially transits between the Golgi apparatus and some of the apical organelles in developing schizonts. Finally, we provide evidence that PfTepsin potentially interacts with members of the clathrin and adaptor protein 4 complexes. IMPORTANCE Malaria takes an enormous toll on affected societies, and new drugs are urgently required. Understanding how the parasite causing malaria replicates could lead to potential new drug targets. Our work characterizes a protein called Tepsin that could potentially be important for the parasite to generate organelles critical for its survival.
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How this classification was reachedexpand
Full frame distilled prediction
Teacher imitationNot calibrated prevalence, not ground truth. Human validation pending. Learned from the 10,348 direct Codex labels and 10,348 direct Gemma labels. Candidate is the union of thresholded teacher heads; consensus is their intersection. These outputs are machine_predicted_unvalidated and are not human labels or direct frontier model labels.
Codex and Gemma teacher scores by category
| Category | Codex | Gemma |
|---|---|---|
| Metaresearch | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Meta-epidemiology (narrow) | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Meta-epidemiology (broad) | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Bibliometrics | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Science and technology studies | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Scholarly communication | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Open science | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Research integrity | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Insufficient payload (model declined to judge) | 0.000 | 0.000 |
Machine scores (provisional)
The two teacher heads of the student model, read on this work. A score orders the frame for review; it never asserts a category, and the validation status ships verbatim with every row.
Baseline scores from an immature model (maturity gate not passed, 7 training rounds). Scores rank; they never assert a category.
score_only:v0-immature-baseline · verbatim from the scoring run: score_only means the number may rank works, and no category label ships from itClassification
machine, unvalidatedMachine predicted; a candidate call from one teacher head, not a consensus.
How this classification was reached, model by model and score by score, is at the end of the page under "How this classification was reached".