Signatures of competition and strain structure within the major blood-stage antigen of Plasmodium falciparum in a local community in Ghana

Abstract

The concept of niche partitioning has received considerable theoretical attention at the interface of ecology and evolution of infectious diseases. Strain theory postulates that pathogen populations can be structured into distinct nonoverlapping strains by frequency-dependent selection in response to intraspecific competition for host immune space. The malaria parasite Plasmodium falciparum presents an opportunity to investigate this phenomenon in nature, under conditions of high recombination rate and extensive antigenic diversity. The parasite's major blood-stage antigen, PfEMP1, is encoded by the hyperdiverse var genes. With a dataset that includes thousands of var DBLα sequence types sam..