Identification of novel vulnerable antimalarial targets

Furthermore, drug candidates acting on vulnerable targets should be triaged as they are most likely to be fast-acting antimalarials and have a lower propensity to resistance. Vulnerable targets can be validated by phenotypic assessment of conditional loss of function mutants.

Here, we created mutants for 17 genes with the glmS ribozyme tool. Target knockdown was assessed by RNA-seq and western blotting. Target vulnerability assay of the mutants identified MDR1, UGT1, DHFS-FPGS, and GAT as vulnerable targets.