Fig. 5.

Inferred Plasmodium SL gene networks to select antimalarial drug targets. To narrow down the list of drug target candidates, potential antimalarial drug target genes are suggested for future experimental validation. The resulting network was filtered by identifying protein similarities in the PDB provided by the PlasmoDB. In three networks, all the filtered inferred Plasmodium SL pairs (ADR genes and their inferred SL partners) do not include human orthologs except for some ADR genes such as PFD0830w, PVX_089950, and PB000415.02.0. These ADR genes and their SL partners extracted from the inferred Plasmodium SL gene network can serve as alternative antimalarial drug targets for malaria patients with ADR genes. In addition, we conjectured the possibility of evolutionary conservation between the yeast genes and Plasmodium homologs through the identification of protein similarities. We then obtained the five inferred SL partners (marked by red loops) having the inferred Plasmodium SL gene networks, which exhibit protein similarities among the yeast orthologs and Plasmodium orthologs. (For interpretation of the references to color in this figure legend, the reader is referred to the web version of this article.)