Reuben Yaa
Extensive antigenic variability of Plasmodium falciparum parasites is known to cause dysregulation of the host immunity during infection and this has been an underlying challenge for antigens that may be clinically protective for vaccine development. Characterizing polymorphism patterns for these antigens in malaria endemic regions will help in further understanding the host-parasite immune interaction.
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Population haplotype analysis Sequences are grouped to Haplotypes based on cladistic relationship and frequencies of the haplotypes determined using phyclust package (Tzeng 2005)
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Temporal haplotype trend
Followed through infection episodes at population level to see how four frequent haplotypes change with time -
Linkage Disequilibrium Analysis done using DnaSP
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Phylogenetic population clustering Haplotypes were ploted using phylogenetic tree by applying hamming pairwise distance matrix for corresponding residues between two sequences of equal lengths.