Altered expression of K13 disrupts DNA replication and repair in Plasmodium falciparum.

BACKGROUND: Plasmodium falciparum exhibits resistance to the artemisinin component of the frontline antimalarial treatment Artemisinin-based Combination Therapy in South East Asia. Millions of lives will be at risk if artemisinin resistance (ART-R) spreads to Africa. Single non-synonymous mutations in the propeller region of PF3D7_1343700,"K13" are implicated in resistance. In this work, we use transcriptional profiling to characterize a laboratory-generated k13 insertional mutant previously demonstrated to have increased sensitivity to artemisinins to explore the functional role of k13. RESULTS: A set of RNA-seq and microarray experiments confirmed that the expression profile of k13 is specifically altered during the early ring and early trophozoite stages of the mutant intraerythrocytic development cycle. The down-regulation of k13 transcripts in this mutant during the early ring stage is associated with a transcriptome advance towards a more trophozoite-like state. To discover the specific downstream effect of k13 dysregulation, we developed a new computational method to search for differential gene expression while accounting for the temporal sequence of transcription. We found that the strongest biological signature of the transcriptome shift is an up-regulation of DNA replication and repair genes during the early ring developmental stage and a down-regulation of DNA replication and repair genes during the early trophozoite stage; by contrast, the expressions of housekeeping genes are unchanged. This effect, due to k13 dysregulation, is antagonistic, such that k13 levels are negatively correlated with DNA replication and repair gene expression. CONCLUSION: Our results support a role for k13 as a stress response regulator consistent with the hypothesis that artemisinins mode of action is oxidative stress and k13 as a functional homolog of Keap1 which in humans regulates DNA replication and repair genes in response to oxidative stress.

A novel algorithm for analyzing drug-drug interactions from MEDLINE literature.

Drug-drug interaction (DDI) is becoming a serious clinical safety issue as the use of multiple medications becomes more common. Searching the MEDLINE database for journal articles related to DDI produces over 330,000 results. It is impossible to read and summarize these references manually. As the volume of biomedical reference in the MEDLINE database continues to expand at a rapid pace, automatic identification of DDIs from literature is becoming increasingly important. In this article, we present a random-sampling-based statistical algorithm to identify possible DDIs and the underlying mechanism from the substances field of MEDLINE records. The substances terms are essentially carriers of compound (including protein) information in a MEDLINE record. Four case studies on warfarin, ibuprofen, furosemide and sertraline implied that our method was able to rank possible DDIs with high accuracy (90.0% for warfarin, 83.3% for ibuprofen, 70.0% for furosemide and 100% for sertraline in the top 10% of a list of compounds ranked by p-value). A social network analysis of substance terms was also performed to construct networks between proteins and drug pairs to elucidate how the two drugs could interact.