Plasmodium falciparum is a protozoan parasite that resides in human red blood cells, but can also infect the brain and liver. P. falciparum is one of the species of Plasmodium that causes malaria in humans. It has a complex life-cycle requiring both human and female Anopheles mosquito. P. falciparum is responsible for the disease's most dangerous form, malignant or falciparum malaria, which has the highest complication rates and mortality.
With more than 200 million cases and 400,000 deaths from malaria worldwide, P. falciparum (causing roughly 50% of the cases) has been the focus of malaria research for decades.
The genome of P. falciparum was first sequenced in 2002.
("Plasmodium falciparum", Wikipedia: The Free Encyclopedia)
From left to right: i) The number of proteins in the reference proteome of Plasmodium falciparum, ii) the total number of models, iii) the number of unique protein sequences for which at least one model is available and iv) a coverage bar plot is shown.
The bar plot shows the coverage for every protein in the reference proteome of Plasmodium falciparum for which there is at least one model. Different colours (dark green to red boxes) represent the coverage of the targets. Targets with high coverage are represented in dark green (more than 80% of the target's length is covered by models), whereas low coverage is shown in red. The size of each box is proportional to the number of target sequences with a given coverage.
| Proteins in Proteome | Sequences modelled | Models | Sequence coverage of models |
| 5,448 | 3,600 | 6,533 |
The plot shows the evolution over years (x-axis) of the fraction of Plasmodium falciparum reference proteome residues (y-axis) for which structural information is available. Different colors (light blue to dark blue) in the plot represent the quality of the sequence alignment between the reference proteome sequences (targets) and the sequences of the protein structure database (templates). Alignments with low sequence identity are displayed in light blue, whereas alignments with high sequence identity are depicted with dark blue in the plot. Target-template alignments were computed using HHblits. NR20 database was used to calculate profiles to search a database derived from all unique PDB protein sequences.
Global quality estimation of SWISS-MODEL Repository models is assessed by the QMEAN4 composite scoring function. The quality bar shows fractions of models divided into categories of varying quality. High QMEAN4 values correspond to high quality models (left side of the bar plot). Below -4.0 QMEAN4 values (right side of the plot), models are often no longer of reliable quality.
Detailed numbers are obtained by hovering the mouse over one of the boxes.
Many proteins form oligomeric structures either by self-assembly (homo-oligomeric) or by assembly with other proteins (hetero-oligomeric) to accomplish their function. In SWISS-MODEL Repository, the quaternary structure annotation of the template is used to model the target sequence in its oligomeric form. Currently our method is limited to the modelling of homo-oligomeric assemblies. The oligomeric state of the template is only considered if the interface is conserved.
| Single Chain | 2-mer | 3-mer | 4-mer | 5-mer | 6-mer | 7-mer | 8-mer | 10-mer | 12-mer | 14-mer | 16-mer | 18-mer | 24-mer |
|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|
| 5,712 | 591 | 51 | 90 | 10 | 46 | 6 | 5 | 6 | 9 | 3 | 2 | 1 | 1 |