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Article: On malaria struggle, baboons and humans have similar stories to tell.
- Article from:
- Biotech Week
- Article date:
- July 8, 2009
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Evolutionarily speaking, baboons may be our more distant cousins among primates. But when it comes to our experiences with malaria over the course of time, it seems the stories of our two species have followed very similar plots (see also Duke University).
In humans, subtle variation in one particular gene that controls whether a protein on the surface of red blood cells gets made or not literally spells the difference between susceptibility or resistance to one form of malaria. That's because the blood protein serves as the entry point for Plasmodium vivax, one of several malaria-causing parasites that infect humans.
Now, researchers at the Duke ...