Fitness, expression, functionality, conservation and evolutionary information of Plasmodium berghei genes.

New anti-malarial drugs are needed to address the challenge of artemisinin resistance and to achieve malaria elimination and eradication. Target-based screening of inhibitors is a major approach for drug discovery, but its application to malaria has been limited by the availability of few validated drug targets in Plasmodium . Here we utilize the recently available large-scale gene essentiality data in Plasmodium berghei and a related apicomplexan pathogen, Toxoplasma gondii, to identify potential anti-malarial drug targets. We find significant conservation of gene essentiality in the two apicomplexan parasites. The conservation of essentiality could be used to prioritize enzymes that are essential across the two parasites and show no or low sequence similarity to human proteins. Novel essential genes in Plasmodium could be predicted based on their essentiality in T. gondii . Essential genes in Plasmodium showed higher expression, evolutionary conservation and association with specific functional classes. We expect that the availability of a large number of novel potential drug targets would significantly accelerate anti-malarial drug discovery.