Reply to Roepe, “The collective creativity of Drs. Baro, Pooput, and Callaghan”

REPLY

We acknowledge Dr. Paul D. Roepe’s concern regarding citation of earlier foundational studies describing codon-optimized back-translation of Plasmodium transporter genes, heterologous expression in Saccharomyces cerevisiae, and drug susceptibility evaluation using yeast spotting and growth assays, which were pioneered and refined by his laboratory (1). We fully agree that these contributions represent important methodological advances in transporter functional studies, and we appreciate the opportunity to recognize this prior work explicitly (2–4).

Dr. Roepe also notes that PfAAT1 (a digestive vacuole-localized transporter implicated in chloroquine resistance evolution) was not detected or discussed in our study. We appreciate this observation and acknowledge that proteome-based detection of FV-resident proteins can be influenced by multiple factors, including abundance, extraction efficiency, membrane association strength, and technical limitations of the purification workflow. However, it was not captured in our data set by both the methods.

We understand his concern and believe that these additions will be useful for the next set of studies for understanding the link between other transporters and drug resistance.