Molecular cloning and characterization of the Plasmodium falciparum cytidine triphosphate synthetase gene.
Using degenerate oligonucleotides derived from conserved amino acid regions of cytidine triphosphate synthetase, a fragment of the gene from the malarial parasite, Plasmodium falciparum, was isolated by polymerase chain reaction (PCR). This fragment was used as a probe in the isolation of genomic clones containing the entire pfCTP synthetase coding region (2580 bp). The gene encodes the largest CTP synthetase found in any organism to date due to the presence of two additional sequences which are part of the continuous open reading frame and are not introns as their presence in the mRNA was confirmed by reverse transcriptase-PCR. These features distinguish the parasite enzyme from that of the host making it an attractive target for structure based drug design.
School of Biochemistry and Molecular Genetics, University of New South Wales, Sydney, Australia.
E F
EF
Hendriks
W J
WJ
O'Sullivan
T S
TS
Stewart
D000595:Amino Acid Sequence; D000818:Animals; D001483:Base Sequence; D019731:Carbon-Nitrogen Ligases / Q000737:chemistry / Q000235:genetics*; D003001:Cloning, Molecular; D008969:Molecular Sequence Data; D010963:Plasmodium falciparum / Q000201:enzymology / Q000235:genetics*; D016133:Polymerase Chain Reaction
D019731:Carbon-Nitrogen Ligases; C019951:CTP synthetase