Figure 3.

Comparative genomic view of gametocytogenesis across Plasmodium lineages. Heatmap showing the number of orthologous genes annotated as expressed specifically in P. falciparum gametocytes as defined by Pelle et al. (2015)(in rows) in major Plasmodium lineages. Apart from P. falciparum we have included P. vivax, P. berghei and P. gallinaceum. The orthologues of the P. falciparum gametocyte genes were retrieved from PlasmoDB (Aurrecoechea et al. 2009). The genes (rows) were reordered by hierarchical clustering using the R function hclust (www.R-project.org). Using P. falciparum as a template (as there are no other species-specific sets of gametocyte genes) the majority of gametocyte-specific genes is conserved across the 4 species (see also Supplementary Table S1 (Supporting Information)). Most P. falciparum-specific genes in the gametocyte ring encode exported proteins. Interestingly, a putative zinc finger protein (PF3D7_1 134 600) has been lost in the rodent lineage only. Only a few immature and mature gametocyte genes are unique to P. falciparum, and most of them encode hypotheticals. Amongst the few exceptions are two putative protein kinases that have been selectively lost in primate (PF3D7_031 1400) and rodent malaria parasites (PF3D7_020 3100), respectively.