Abstract
Chloroplasts are essential organelles that are responsible for photosynthesis in a wide range of organisms that have colonized all biotopes on Earth such as plants and unicellular algae. Interestingly, a secondary endosymbiotic event of a red algal ancestor gave rise to a group of organisms that have adopted an obligate parasitic lifestyle named Apicomplexa parasites. Apicomplexa parasites are some of the most widespread and poorly controlled pathogens in the world. These infectious agents are responsible for major human diseases such as toxoplasmosis, caused by Toxoplasma gondii, and malaria, caused by Plasmodium spp. Most of these parasites harbor this relict plastid named the apicoplast, which is essential for parasite survival. The apicoplast has lost photosynthetic capacities but is metabolically similar to plant and algal chloroplasts. The apicoplast is considered a novel and important drug target against Apicomplexa parasites. This chapter focuses on the apicoplast of apicomplexa parasites, its maintenance, and its metabolic pathways.
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27 April 2024
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Acknowledgments
This work and their authors were supported by Agence Nationale de la Recherche, France (Project ApicoLipiAdapt grant ANR-21-CE44-0010; Project Apicolipidtraffic grant ANR-23-CE15-0009-01), The Fondation pour la Recherche MÕdicale (FRM EQU202103012700), Laboratoire d’Excellence Parafrap, France (grant ANR-11-LABX-0024), LIA-IRP CNRS Program (Apicolipid project), the Université Grenoble Alpes (IDEX ISP Apicolipid) and Région Auvergne Rhone-Alpes for the lipidomics analyses platform (Grant IRICE Project GEMELI), Collaborative Research Program Grant CEFIPRA (Project 6003-1) by the CEFIPRA (MESRI-DBT).
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Quansah, N., Charital, S., Yamaryo-Botté, Y., Botté, C.Y. (2024). Complex Endosymbiosis II: The Nonphotosynthetic Plastid of Apicomplexa Parasites (The Apicoplast) and Its Integrated Metabolism. In: Maréchal, E. (eds) Plastids. Methods in Molecular Biology, vol 2776. Humana, New York, NY. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-1-0716-3726-5_3
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DOI: https://doi.org/10.1007/978-1-0716-3726-5_3
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