Figure 1.

Conditional depletion of PFE1605w. Confocal immunofluorescence and Western blot analysis of synchronized 3D7 parasites expressing endogenous PFE1605w as a C‐terminally tagged DD fusion protein grown for 96 h in the presence (PFE1605w^ON) or absence (PFE1605w^OFF) of 625 nM Shield‐1.

A. Confocal immunofluorescence.

B. Western blot. The specificity of affinity‐purified polyclonal α‐PFE1605w antibodies is described in Fig. S1B. The nuclei were stained with DAPI. Scale bar = 3 µm. GAPDH was used as loading control.

C. Semistatic adhesion assay of RBCs infected with PFE1605w^ON/PFE1605w^OFF parasites to immobilized recombinant CD36 at 50 µg ml⁻¹. The graph displays mean values across triplicate samples normalized to 3D7 wild‐type parasite binding. The error bars represent SDs of three independent experiments. An arbitrary threshold (dashed line) for unspecific binding was calculated as the mean level of iRBC binding to 1% w/v BSA plus 2 SDs. P values were calculated by using a two‐tailed Student's t‐test, asterisk indicates P ≤ 0.05.