A TENTH of the malaria parasite’s genes turn out to be plant genes. That means drugs based on weedkillers could be used to treat the disease, which kills more than a million people a year.
“There are 500 proteins that are plant proteins that humans don’t have. Drugs that target those proteins probably won’t have side effects on us,” says botanist Geoff McFadden of the University of Melbourne.
The sequence of the parasite’s genome, and that of its host the Anopheles mosquito, were published in Nature and Science last week. One of the discoveries, which surprised many experts, was that roughly 550 of malaria’s 5300 genes…
