During the past decades, many efforts have been undertaken to establish a continuous culture system for P. vivax. One of the major challenges in the development of in vitro culture of P. vivax lies in its preference to invade reticulocytes. Provision of sufficient reticulocytes is a critical factor for the success of continuous culture of this parasite. We have simplified the technique to purified reticulocytes from peripheral blood.
This cool video produced by Dr. Nil Gural. It shows you how we produce P. vivax sporozoites. It requires the following not-so-pleasant steps: (1) Forced Mating (2) Access to malaria infected blood from patients (3) On-site feeding of infected blood to female mosquitos (4) Manual dissecting salivary gland to access the sporozoites
In vitro culture of P. vivax liver satge using HCO4 cell line. This video is taken by Mr. Wiwatchai Chanbanchong, PhD student who’s working on the identification of host factors that regulate P. vivax liverstage development. In this video, free merozome of P. vivax started to appeared in the culture with very active moving merozoites inside (on the left). On the right, free merozoites are comming out. This indicate a complete development of liver stage parasite in HCO4 model.
