Back

Endogenous structure of antimalarial target PfATP4 reveals new class of apicomplexan P-type ATPase modulators

Haile, M. T.; Shukla, A.; Zhen, J.; Mather, M. W.; Bhatnagar, S.; Zhang, Z.; Vaidya, A. B.; Ho, C.-M.

2025-02-25 microbiology
10.1101/2025.02.25.640208 bioRxiv
Show abstract

The Plasmodium falciparum sodium efflux pump PfATP4 is a leading antimalarial target, but suffers from a lack of high-resolution structural information needed to identify functionally important features in conserved regions and guide rational design of next generation inhibitors. Here, we determine a 3.7[A] cryoEM structure of PfATP4 purified from CRISPR-engineered P. falciparum parasites, revealing a previously unknown, apicomplexan-specific binding partner, PfABP, which forms a conserved, likely modulatory interaction with PfATP4. The discovery of PfABP presents a new avenue for designing novel PfATP4 inhibitors.

Matching journals

The top 2 journals account for 50% of the predicted probability mass.

50% of probability mass above

"Similar papers" are the closest papers from that journal in the model's embedding space. They show what the match is built on, but the ranking comes mostly from a classifier over the whole training set, not from these examples alone.