In-silicoValidation of the Essentiality of Reactions in Plasmodium Falciparum Metabolic Network

Plasmodium falciparum are instrumental in causing malaria and have developed complex life cycles, thus, it becomes very possible for the malaria parasite to take advantage of the uniqueness of its pathways to design therapeutic strategies. Despite the colossal efforts put in to fight malaria the disease still affects up to over 200 million people every year amongst which close to half a million dies. The treatment of the disease, could be done successfully if the essential enzymes of this parasite is precisely targeted. Nevertheless, the development of the parasite to resisting existing drugs now makes it a core responsibility to discover novel drugs. In this study, existing essential reactions from different literature are considered and evaluated to determine reactions that are common in all literature and evaluated to determine their essentiality level. This study evaluates essential reactions that has been predicted in literature computationally and validates its essentiality based on the reconstructed metabolic network and identifies 10 essential reactions that are common to all existing literature of which all this reaction were validated to be essential by our method. This study has established a simple novel in-silico method that validates predicted essential reactions in a metabolic network which makes validation of predicted anti-malarial drug target cheaper, easier and faster. This study in-silico model serves as a valuable tool for validation of Plasmodium falciparum metabolic states under various perturbations.