PIXABAY, GERALT
A team of researchers from Chinese and Singaporean institutions has identified 124 proteins targeted by the malaria-fighting compound artemisinin, as well as the source of the iron required for the drug’s activation. The group’s results were published last week (December 22) in Nature Communications.
The discovery of artemisinin won Chinese scientist Youyou Tu a Nobel Prize in Physiology or Medicine this year, but questions have still surrounded artemisinin’s exact mechanism of action. In the current study, researchers labeled and tracked artemisinin to identify its targets in two strains of the malaria parasite Plasmodium falciparum.
The research team discovered that artemisinin is activated by the iron contained in heme, a component of hemoglobin, rather than by free-floating iron. The source of heme is both the parasite’s ...
