6th ASEAN Congress of Tropical Medicine Parasitology 2014

O7.4 - Conserved domains and phylogenetic relationships of the

circumsporozoite protein of Plasmodium vivax in Sri Lanka

1
Lakma N Gunarathne, 2*Preethi V Udagama
1
Bioinformatics Special Degree Programme, Department of Plant Sciences, Faculty of
Science, University of Colombo, Colombo 03, Sri Lanka.
2
Department of Zoology, Faculty of Science, University of Colombo,
Colombo 03, Sri Lanka.

The present study focused on bridging a few existing knowledge gaps in a Sri Lankan
context on vaccine informatics of Plasmodium vivax Circumsporozoite Protein (PvCSP), a
leading vaccine candidate. Conserved domains of PvCSP were determined using entropy
measures of protein. Phylogenetic relationships of PvCSP among Sri Lankan and global
isolates were analyzed (NCBI GenBank database: Sri Lanka, N=60, China N=37, India
N=70, Iran N=113, Latin America N=7, South Korea N=62 and Thailand N=2). A 36-base
post repeat insertion followed by the terminal motif GGQAA at the end of the central repeat
region of PvCSP with a 12 amino acid insert GGNAANKKAEDA was first observed in a
reemerged Korean strain and recently recorded in P. vivax parasites collected in Thailand
and Iran. The insert was followed by a single copy of GGNA, a tetra peptide repeat. During
the current study, for the first time, the same sequence pattern was observed in the Sri
Lankan, Chinese, Thai, Indian and Iranian isolates examined. Five prominent conserved
regions were observed for PvCSP by analyzing 60 Sri Lankan single clone isolates,
spanning nucleotide positions 129-143, 156-170, 210-224, 379-395 and 577-654. Significant
low entropy was observed approximately in nucleotide position 577-654 and the nucleotide
diversity (π) for that region was approximately 0.005 indicating a highly conserved region
which coincided with the terminal motif followed by the insert region. The Maximum
Likelihood phylogenetic tree showed an adjacent clustering of isolates from Sri Lanka, India
and China. This was confirmed by the FST values between 0 - 0.05 representing no
significant differentiation among these populations. This may provide a clue that parasites
circulating in Sri Lanka may be derived from strains introduced from South-East Asia. Rather
limited diversity in PvCSP within Sri Lanka, and phylogenetic alliance to South East Asian
origin implies that a CSP based vaccine against P. vivax may be effective in the region.

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