Abstract
Malaria has been a problem in the public health sector and Sub-saharan African. The most prevalent symptoms of this disease is caused by Plasmodium falciparum, a blood borne pathogen, there has also been a disclosure of resistance to anti malaria drugs in Pf. An intimate process of acquiring insight to an organism’s metabolism is to analyze her network topology deploying computational techniques.
In this research, the Flux Balance Analysis (FBA) of the metabolism of malaria parasite, Plasmodium falciparum that has been converted to a System Biology Markup Language (SBML) format in another work (Segun et al. 2014) was used to predict the metabolic activities and to investigate the consistency of the multi-compartment biochemical metabolic network of the parasite using FASIMU software.
With a projected output in view, a flux-balance computation was first deployed on an energy model and redox metabolism of the human red blood cells to learn the internal structure of FASIMU, this was a simpler model compared to Plasmodium falciparum model. The results of the analysis generated a file that consists of the flux values, reaction identifiers, equilibrium constants adopted and the concentration values. It was also discovered that transporters conveyed metabolites among the various cellular compartments of the organism. Further results of the flux balance analysis of the compartmented Plasmodium falciparum metabolic network generated a comprehensive list of target metabolites indispensable to the growth of the organism, which have been confirmed by recent literature. It is evident that the results generated from this research represent a significant step towards discovering drug targets.
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Adebiyi, M. et al. (2019). Computational Investigation of Consistency and Performance of the Biochemical Network of the Malaria Parasite, Plasmodium falciparum. In: Misra, S., et al. Computational Science and Its Applications – ICCSA 2019. ICCSA 2019. Lecture Notes in Computer Science(), vol 11623. Springer, Cham. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-030-24308-1_19
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DOI: https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-030-24308-1_19
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