Figure 1

The homology block architecture of DBLα tags. (A) The architecture of a var gene and the PfEMP1 protein it encodes. The number, identity and order of the DBL and CIDR domains varies. One of the only constants is the presence of a single DBLα domain, which is located at the N-terminal end of the coding region. The DBLα domain is made up of subdomains S1-3. The tag comes from a region of S2. Twenty-nine distinct homology blocks were found within the cDNA dataset and almost the same set (all but HB 556) were found within the genomic dataset. (B) The output from Vardom Server [8] with added HB labels for the dominantly expressed sequence tags for four of the highest rosetting isolates within the cDNA dataset, chosen as follows: from the symptomatic isolates with the highest rosetting rates (i.e., the 22 isolates with transformed rosetting rates over 0.5), we identified those with a single dominantly expressed sequence (i.e., approximately twice as large as the expression rate of any other sequence or more, and larger than the rest of the sequences’ expression rates combined), and this amounted to seven sequences; the four shown are those with good HB coverage (more than 3 HBs within the tag). It is indicated whether the patient from which the sample was taken exhibited impaired consciousness (IC).