The lack of a continuous in vitro culture system for Plasmodium vivax severely limits our knowledge of 1 1 pathophysiology of the most widespread malaria parasite. To gain direct understanding of P. vivax 1 2 human infections, we used Next Generation Sequencing data mining to unravel parasite in vivo 1 3 expression profiles for P. vivax, and P. falciparum as comparison. We performed cloud and local 1 4 computing to extract parasite transcriptomes from publicly available raw data of human blood samples.
5We developed a Poisson Modelling (PM) method to confidently identify parasite derived transcripts in mixed RNAseq signals of infected host tissues. We successfully retrieved and reconstructed parasite We discovered that P. vivax in vivo parasitemia is associated with gametocytogenesis expression 2 6 signature within the first blood stage cycle, that is, eight days from a mosquito bite. Our results
7suggest that asexual-to-sexual commitment may happen with first generation merozoite infection.
8This allows for the possibility of transmission at this early stage, much earlier than for P. falciparum.
9Our novel mathematical model accounts for multiple unique aspects of P. vivax biology to advance 3 0 our understanding of expected disease prevalence, and compares the results to those of P. falciparum. We demonstrate that given the presence of asymptotical carriers and the possibility of cycle, which will drive enhanced propagation of the disease during the transmission season and clinical relapses.