Thursday, September 11, 2008

Protein of the Day #4: apical membrane antigen 1 (AMA1)

In the Plasmodium species that cause malaria, the merozoite stage must invade red blood cells. It does this using the strange apicoplast organelle, which is a much-warped descendent of a chloroplast. Apicoplast:chloroplast as Gollum:Hobbit. Anyway, one of the proteins that helps this invasion is the apical membrane antigen 1, although like most Plasmodial proteins not that much is known about it.

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