Figure 6. Blood-stage infections started sporozoites are similar to those started with 10⁶ infected erythrocytes.

Mice were injected i.v. with 1000, 100 or 10 sporozoites (spz, black and grey bars) or the vehicle RPMI (white bars). (A) At the indicated days post-injection, splenocytes from groups of 3 mice were analyzed for the two subpopulations, expressed as the proportion of CD11c⁺ cells (DCs). Error bars represent standard deviation within groups of 3 mice (***, P < 0.001 when comparing iRBC to RBC by one-way ANOVA). (B) Parasitaemia were counted via Giemsa-stained slides (white symbols) and are overlaid here with the parasitemia curves from infections started with 10⁶ and 10⁵ infected erythrocytes from Figure 5B for comparison (grey symbols). The differences between the doses of 10⁶ and 10⁵ infected erythrocytes on day 3 become apparent because of the logarithmic scale used. The graph is normalized to account for the 2 days of development required by sporozoites before starting blood-stage infections. Parasitemia counts below the level of detection are plotted below the black dashed line.