Development and optimizing a simple and cost-effective medium for in vitro culture of Plasmodium berghei-ANKA strain with conserving its infectivity in BALB/c mice.

Objectives: The current culture system for P. berghei still requires modifications in consistency and long-term maintenance of parasites considering their pathogenicity in culture media. Therefore, this study designed to further improvement of culture conditions and designing a cost-effective culture medium with minimum changes in pathogenicity for in vitro culture of P. berghei.

Results: Results indicated that the rate of parasitaemia in our modified method remained statistically stable between days one to seven (P = 0.07). The current modified cultivation method was more efficient in maintaining of parasites for further days. Furthermore, in current method the stability of parasitaemia rate during day1 to day7 was in better rate compared to that in Ronan Jambou et al. and the differences between two methods were statistically significant (P = 0.001). The virulence of cultivated parasites in our modified method remained similar to frozen stock parasites as positive control group. No significant differences were seen in survival time between two groups of mice those were infected with either cultivated parasites or stock freeze parasites (P = 0.39) with the mean survival time of 20.83 ± 3.84 and 19.66 ± 1.21 days, respectively. Herein, we achieved a simple, cost-effective and applicable technique for culture of P. berghei.