Spatiotemporal analysis of Plasmodium falciparum erythrocyte binding antigen-175 gene dimorphism in Ghana.

Background: Malaria remains a leading cause of death worldwide, claiming over 600,000 lives each year. Over 90% of these deaths, mostly among children under 5 years, occur in sub-Saharan Africa and are caused by Plasmodium falciparum. The merozoites stage of the parasite, crucial for asexual development invade erythrocytes through ligand-receptor interactions.

scRNA-seq reveals elevated interferon responses and TNF-α signaling via NFkB in monocytes in children with uncomplicated malaria.

Malaria causes significant morbidity and mortality worldwide, disproportionately impacting sub-Saharan Africa. Disease phenotypes associated with infection can vary widely, from asymptomatic to life-threatening. To date, prevention efforts, particularly those related to vaccine development, have been hindered by an incomplete understanding of which factors impact host immune responses resulting in these divergent outcomes.

Gossypol is a natural product with good antimalarial activity against Plasmodium falciparum clinical isolates.

Gossypol has demonstrated significant antimalarial activity against chloroquine-resistant and susceptible Plasmodium falciparum parasites. However, data on its potency in clinical isolates of P. falciparum remains limited.

Innovative diagnostic technologies: navigating regulatory frameworks through advances, challenges, and future prospects.

Diagnostic tools are key to guiding patient management and informing public health policies to control infectious diseases. However, many diseases still do not have effective diagnostics and much of the global population faces restricted access to reliable, affordable testing. This limitation underscores the urgent need for innovation to enhance diagnostic availability and effectiveness.

Identification of complex Plasmodium falciparum genetic backgrounds circulating in Africa: a multicountry genomic epidemiology analysis.

Background: The population structure of the malaria parasite Plasmodium falciparum can reveal underlying adaptive evolutionary processes. Selective pressures to maintain complex genetic backgrounds can encourage inbreeding, producing distinct parasite clusters identifiable by population structure analyses.

Methods: We analysed population structure in 3783 P falciparum genomes from 21 countries across Africa, provided by the MalariaGEN Pf7 dataset.

Self-actuated microfluidic chiplet for two-stage multiplex nucleic acid amplification assay.

Effective diagnosis of comorbidities and infectious diseases that present similar symptoms requires point-of-need assays capable of co-detecting and differentiating among multiple co-endemic pathogens to enable timely, precision medicine and effective control measures. We previously developed a two-stage isothermal amplification assay dubbed Penn-RAMP to address this need. Penn-RAMP's first stage comprises a recombinase polymerase amplification (RPA), which amplifies all targets of interest in a single reaction chamber for a short duration.

Cellular immune response to SARS-CoV-2 and clinical presentation in individuals exposed to endemic malaria.

Ghana and other parts of West Africa have experienced lower COVID-19 mortality rates than other regions. This phenomenon has been hypothesized to be associated with previous exposure to infections such as malaria. This study investigated the immune response to severe acute respiratory syndrome coronavirus 2 (SARS-CoV-2) and the influence of previous malaria exposure.

Association of symptomatic upper respiratory tract infections with the alteration of the oropharyngeal microbiome in a cohort of school children in Côte d'Ivoire.

Introduction: The oropharyngeal microbiome plays an important role in protection against infectious agents when in balance. Despite use of vaccines and antibiotic therapy to prevent respiratory tract infections, they remain one of the major causes of mortality and morbidity in Low- and middle-income countries. Hence the need to explore other approaches to prevention by identifying microbial biomarkers that could be leveraged to modify the microbiota in order to enhance protection against pathogenic bacteria.

Development and utility of a SARS-CoV-2 pseudovirus assay for compound screening and antibody neutralization assays.

Background: The highly infectious nature of SARS-CoV-2 necessitates using bio-containment facilities to study viral pathogenesis and identify potent antivirals. However, the lack of high-level bio-containment laboratories across the world has limited research efforts into SARS-CoV-2 pathogenesis and the discovery of drug candidates. Previous research has reported that non-replicating SARS-CoV-2 Spike-pseudotyped viral particles are effective tools to screen for and identify entry inhibitors and neutralizing antibodies.

Addressing pandemic-wide systematic errors in the SARS-CoV-2 phylogeny.

The SARS-CoV-2 genome occupies a unique place in infection biology - it is the most highly sequenced genome on earth (making up over 20% of public sequencing datasets) with fine scale information on sampling date and geography, and has been subject to unprecedented intense analysis. As a result, these phylogenetic data are an incredibly valuable resource for science and public health. However, the vast majority of the data was sequenced by tiling amplicons across the full genome, with amplicon schemes that changed over the pandemic as mutations in the viral genome interacted with primer binding sites.

Upper Airway Epithelial Tissue Transcriptome Analysis Reveals Immune Signatures Associated with COVID-19 Severity in Ghanaians.

The immunological signatures driving the severity of coronavirus disease 19 (COVID-19) in Ghanaians remain poorly understood. We performed bulk transcriptome sequencing of nasopharyngeal samples from severe acute respiratory syndrome coronavirus-2 (SARS-CoV-2)-infected Ghanaians with mild and severe COVID-19, as well as healthy controls to characterize immune signatures at the primary SARS-CoV-2 infection site and identify drivers of disease severity. Generally, a heightened antiviral response was observed in SARS-CoV-2-infected Ghanaians compared with uninfected controls.

Knowledge, attitude and perception towards COVID-19 among representative educated sub-Saharan Africans: A cross-sectional study during the exponential phase of the pandemic.

Coronavirus disease 2019 (COVID-19) pandemic, caused by the Severe Acute Coronavirus 2 (SARS-CoV-2), is a global health threat with extensive misinformation and conspiracy theories. Therefore, this study investigated the knowledge, attitude and perception of sub-Saharan Africans (SSA) on COVID-19 during the exponential phase of the pandemic. In this cross-sectional survey, self-administered web-based questionnaires were distributed through several online platforms.

Drug resistance and vaccine target surveillance of Plasmodium falciparum using nanopore sequencing in Ghana.

Malaria results in over 600,000 deaths annually, with the highest burden of deaths in young children living in sub-Saharan Africa. Molecular surveillance can provide important information for malaria control policies, including detection of antimalarial drug resistance. However, genome sequencing capacity in malaria-endemic countries is limited.

The temporal dynamics of Plasmodium species infection after artemisinin-based combination therapy (ACT) among asymptomatic children in the Hohoe municipality, Ghana.

Background: The routine surveillance of asymptomatic malaria using nucleic acid-based amplification tests is essential in obtaining reliable data that would inform malaria policy formulation and the implementation of appropriate control measures.

Methods: In this study, the prevalence rate and the dynamics of Plasmodium species among asymptomatic children (n = 1697) under 5 years from 30 communities within the Hohoe municipality in Ghana were determined.

Results And Discussion: The observed prevalence of Plasmodium parasite infection by polymerase chain reaction (PCR) was 33.

Co-infection of Plasmodium falciparum and Schistosoma mansoni is associated with anaemia.

Background: Malaria and schistosomiasis persist as major public health challenge in sub-Saharan Africa. These infections have independently and also in polyparasitic infection been implicated in anaemia and nutritional deficiencies. This study aimed at assessing asymptomatic malaria, intestinal Schistosoma infections and the risk of anaemia among school children in the Tono irrigation area in the Kassena Nankana East Municipal (KNEM) in the Upper East Region of Northern Ghana.

The global transcriptome of mid-stage gametocytes (stages II-IV) appears largely conserved and gametocyte-specific gene expression patterns vary in clinical isolates.

Our overall understanding of the developmental biology of malaria parasites has been greatly enhanced by recent advances in transcriptomic analysis. However, most of these investigations rely on laboratory strains (LS) that were adapted into culture many years ago, and the transcriptomes of clinical isolates (CI) circulating in human populations have not been assessed. In this study, RNA-seq was used to compare the global transcriptome of mid-stage gametocytes derived from three short-term cultured CI, with gametocytes derived from the NF54 reference laboratory strain.

Recent increase in low complexity polygenomic infections and sialic acid-independent invasion pathways in Plasmodium falciparum from Western Gambia.

Background: The malaria parasite Plasmodium falciparum utilizes multiple alternative receptor-ligand interactions for the invasion of human erythrocytes. While some P. falciparum clones make use of sialic acid (SA) residues on the surface of the human glycophorin receptors to invade the erythrocyte, others use alternative receptors independent of sialic acid residues.

Development of an Affordable ELISA Targeting the SARS-CoV-2 Nucleocapsid and Its Application to Samples from the Ongoing COVID-19 Epidemic in Ghana.

Introduction: The true nature of the population spread of severe acute respiratory syndrome coronavirus 2 (SARS-CoV-2) in populations is often not fully known as most cases, particularly in Africa, are asymptomatic. Finding the true magnitude of SARS-CoV-2 spread is crucial to provide actionable data about the epidemiological progress of the disease for researchers and policymakers. This study developed and optimized an antibody enzyme-linked immunosorbent assay (ELISA) using recombinant nucleocapsid antigen expressed in-house using a simple bacterial expression system.

High burden of asymptomatic malaria and anaemia despite high adherence to malaria control measures: a cross-sectional study among pregnant women across two seasons in a malaria-endemic setting in Ghana.

Purpose: Anaemia remains a serious concern among pregnant women, and thus, it is closely monitored from the onset of pregnancy through to delivery to help prevent adverse maternal and neonatal outcomes. In malaria-endemic settings, continuous low-level carriage of P. falciparum parasites is common and its contribution to maternal anaemia should not be underestimated.

Genomic variation during culture adaptation of genetically complex clinical isolates.

Experimental studies on the biology of malaria parasites have mostly been based on laboratory-adapted lines, but there is limited understanding of how these may differ from parasites in natural infections. Loss-of-function mutants have previously been shown to emerge during culture of some clinical isolates in analyses focusing on single-genotype infections. The present study included a broader array of isolates, mostly representing multiple-genotype infections, which are more typical in areas where malaria is highly endemic.

A genetic Study of the Ghanaian Population Using 15 Autosomal STR Loci.

Autosomal short tandem repeat (STR) population data collected from a well characterized population are needed to correctly assigning the weight of DNA profiles in the courtroom and widely used for ancestral analyses. In this study, allele frequencies for the 15 autosomal short tandem repeat (STR) loci included in the AmpFlSTR® Identifiler® plus kit (D8S1179, D21S11, D7S820, CSF1PO, D3S1358, TH01, D13S317, D16S539, D2S1338, D19S433, VWA, TPOX, D18S51, D5S818, FGA) were obtained by genotyping 332 unrelated individuals of Ghanaian origin. Statistical tests on STR genotype data showed no significant departure from Hardy-Weinberg equilibrium (HWE).

Pf7: an open dataset of genome variation in 20,000 worldwide samples.

We describe the MalariaGEN Pf7 data resource, the seventh release of genome variation data from the MalariaGEN network.  It comprises over 20,000 samples from 82 partner studies in 33 countries, including several malaria endemic regions that were previously underrepresented.  For the first time we include dried blood spot samples that were sequenced after selective whole genome amplification, necessitating new methods to genotype copy number variations.