Malaria question

If a host already has malaria, the female mosquito Anopheles, sucks the parasite (Plasmodium) gametes into it's stomach, where a zygote develops. After some time, the infectious stages go up to the mosquitoes salivary glands. This means, once the mosquito bites another person, who is uninfected, a little saliva will also be injected. Once in the body, the parasite enters the liver, where it begins to reproduce (asexually??), before being released back into the blood. It then travels and enters the red blood cells, where the gametes are produced.

Am I missing anything?

Reply 1

Joshalos

Original post by rm_27

I am not sure how much detail you need to go into but it goes like this, starting from where you started.

Female Anopheles mosquito takes a blood meal from an infected person. The mosquito takes up gametocytes (micro- and megagametocytes) and they fuse to form a zygote in the gut. This develops into an ookinete and invades the gut wall where it forms an oocyst. The oocyst grows and divides to form sporozoites. The oocyst bursts and the sporozoites are released and enter the mosquito's salivary gland.

The mosquito takes another blood meal which releases sporozoites into the blood stream where they migrate to the liver (and attach to hepatocytes using surface proteins). These multiply to produce many schizonts, a collection of merozoites. The hepatocyte bursts releasing these merozoites into the blood stream where they can infect red blood cells.

Each merozoite develops into the ring form trophozoite (an identifiable stage when examining a blood slide with microscopy). Trophpozoites feed on haemoglobin, dvide to form more schizonts (containing merozoites) which burst out of the red blood cell and infect new red blood cells. This cycle continues.

After a while, trophozoited develop into gametocytes instead of merozoites (possibly in response to a reduction in nutrients in the blood) which is taken up by a mosquito when bitten and the cycle starts anew.

I know there are lots of different words, merozoite, trophozoite etc. and I don't know how much depth you need to know. It may just be acceptable for you to refer to it as a parasite throughout the stage as long as you make it clear when it forms gametocytes instead of further merozoites.