PLASMODIUM FALCIPARUM TRANSMISSION‐BLOCKING PROTEINS SECRETED FROM BACTERIA IN THE MOSQUITO MIDGUT

Malaria kills from 1.5 to 2.7 million people each year. Due to the increasing prevalence of drug‐resistant parasites and insecticide‐resistant vectors, alternative control methods are urgently needed. This research provides successful examples of transmission‐blocking induced by paratransgenic bacteria fed to mosquitoes. We have built transmission‐blocking constructs expressing the anti‐malarial chitinase, enolase and scorpine peptides. These constructs were tested for secretion from E. coli, Pantoea agglomerans and Asaia and the resulting bacterial strains for transmission blocking in mosquito. In order to release multiple copies of these peptides from a single secretion construct, a protein containing the Anopheles specific trypsin cleavage site, IEGR, was tested for secretion and proteolysis in the midgut by surrounding it with epitope tags N and C terminally and assaying the resulting midgut isolate by western blot for the presence of cleaved epitope tags. Ultimately, these cleavage sites will be incorporated around anti‐malarial peptides and cloned into bacteria so that the peptides are released by gut proteases. ASBMB UAN Undergraduate Research Award