No Idle Chatter: Malaria Parasites 'Talk' to Each Other

Melbourne scientists have made the surprise discovery that malaria parasites can 'talk' to each other -- a social behaviour to ensure the parasite's survival and improve its chances of being transmitted to other humans.

The finding could provide a niche for developing antimalarial drugs and vaccines that prevent or treat the disease by cutting these communication networks. Alan Cowman from University of Melbourne said the researchers were shocked to discover that malaria parasites work in unison to enhance 'activation' into sexually mature forms that can be picked up by mosquitoes, which are the carriers of this deadly disease.

"I was absolutely amazed, I couldn't believe it," Professor Cowman said. "We repeated the experiments many times in many different ways before I really started to believe that these parasites were signalling to each other and communicating. But we came to appreciate why the malaria parasite really needs this mechanism -- it needs to know how many other parasites are in the human to sense when is the right time to activate into sexual forms that give it the best chance of being transmitted back to the mosquito."

Neta Regev-Rudzki said the malaria parasites inside red blood cells communicate by sending packages of DNA to each other during the blood stage of infection. "We showed that the parasites inside infected red blood cells can send little packets of information from one parasite to another, particularly in response to stress," she said.