Telomeric Heterochromatin in Plasmodium falciparum
Figure 1
A model of P. falciparum chromosome organization. (a) The P. falciparum haploid nuclear genome is organized into 14 linear chromosomes. Each chromosome is composed of an internal region in which housekeeping genes are located, and a chromosome end that displays a higher-order DNA organization common to all P. falciparum chromosomes. Downstream of telomeres resides at highly polymorphic TAS composed of a noncoding and a coding region. The noncoding region contains six TAREs, which are always positioned in the same order but are of variable length. TARE6, also known as Rep20, is responsible for most of the length polymorphism observed in the noncoding region of the TAS. The coding region contains several gene families encoding important virulence factors, such as the var and rifin genes. (b) A schematic representation of post-translational histone modifications in P. falciparum. The amino acids on the N-terminal tails of histone H2A, H2B, H3, H4 and the histone variants H2A.Z and H3.3 that are subject to different modifications are described in the figure.
