Fig. 1.

Rationale for SL applications in antimalarial therapy. Rationale for synthetic lethality applied in the design of novel antimalarial therapies. Two genes are synthetic lethal (SL) if the mutation of either gene alone is compatible with viability; the mutation of both leads to death. (A) Single gene targeting is more likely to express toxicity in both the malaria parasite and the human cell. (B) If one gene of the SL pair is mutated and the other SL partner is not mutated, the human cells would not die. However, if both SL partners are inactivated in the malaria parasite, the parasite is selectively damaged.