A putative serine-threonine kinase 2 () is required for late liver stage development and timely initiation of blood stage infection.

In , protein kinases govern key biological processes of the parasite life cycle involved in the establishment of infection, dissemination and sexual reproduction. The rodent malaria model encodes for 66 putative eukaryotic protein kinases (ePKs) as identified through modelling domain signatures and are highly conserved in We report here the functional characterisation of a putative serine-threonine kinase identified in this kinome analysis and designate it as To elucidate its role, we knocked out locus and performed a detailed phenotypic analysis at different life cycle stages. The knockout (KO) was not compromised in asexual blood stage propagation, transmission and development in the mosquito vector.

Plasmodium berghei sporozoite specific genes- PbS10 and PbS23/SSP3 are required for the development of exo-erythrocytic forms.

Plasmodium sporozoites are infective forms of the parasite to mammalian hepatocytes. Sporozoite surface or secreted proteins likely play an important role in recognition, invasion and successful establishment of hepatocyte infection. By approaches of reverse genetics, we report the functional analysis of two Plasmodium berghei (Pb) sporozoite specific genes- PbS10 and PbS23/SSP3 that encode for proteins with a putative signal peptide.