Malaria Journal BioMed Central Research Open Access Data mining of the transcriptome of Plasmodium falciparum: the pentose phosphate pathway and ancillary processes Zbynek Bozdech1 and Hagai Ginsburg*2 Address: 1School of Biological Sciences, Nanyang Technological University, 637551 Singapore and 2Department of Biological Chemistry, Institute of Life Sciences, The Hebrew University of Jerusalem, Jerusalem 91904, Israel Email: Zbynek Bozdech -
[email protected]; Hagai Ginsburg* -
[email protected] * Corresponding author Published: 18 March 2005 Received: 15 January 2005 Accepted: 18 March 2005 Malaria Journal 2005, 4:17 doi:10.1186/1475-2875-4-17 This article is available from: http://www.malariajournal.com/content/4/1/17 © 2005 Bozdech and Ginsburg; licensee BioMed Central Ltd. This is an Open Access article distributed under the terms of the Creative Commons Attribution License (http://creativecommons.org/licenses/by/2.0), which permits unrestricted use, distribution, and reproduction in any medium, provided the original work is properly cited. Abstract The general paradigm that emerges from the analysis of the transcriptome of the malaria parasite Plasmodium falciparum is that the expression clusters of genes that code for enzymes engaged in the same cellular function is coordinated. Here the consistency of this perception is examined by analysing specific pathways that metabolically-linked. The pentose phosphate pathway (PPP) is a fundamental element of cell biochemistry since it is the major pathway for the recycling of NADP+ to NADPH and for the production of ribose-5-phosphate that is needed for the synthesis of nucleotides. The function of PPP depends on the synthesis of NADP+ and thiamine pyrophosphate, a co-enzyme of the PPP enzyme transketolase.