The RNA structurome in the asexual blood stages of malaria pathogen plasmodium falciparum

RNA as an effector of biological functions often adopts secondary and tertiary structural folds. Plasmodium falciparum is a deadly human pathogen responsible for the devastating disease called malaria. In this study, we measured the differential accumulation of RNA secondary structures in coding and noncoding transcripts from the asexual developmental cycle in P. falciparum in human red blood cells. Our comprehensive analysis, combining high-throughput nuclease mapping of RNA structures by duplex RNA-seq, immunoaffinity purification and RNA analysis, collectively measured differentially base-paired RNA regions during the parasite development. Our mapping data not only aligned to a diverse pool of RNAs with known structures but also enabled us to identify new structural RNA regions in the malaria genome. On average, ~71% of the genes with secondary structures are found to be protein coding mRNAs. Mapping pattern of these base-paired RNAs corresponded to all parts of protein-coding mRNAs, including 5’ UTR, CDS and 3’ UTR. In addition to histone family genes which are known to form secondary structures in their mRNAs, transcripts from genes which are important for transcriptional and post-transcriptional control, such as unique plant-like transcription factor family, ApiAP2, DNA/RNA binding protein family, Alba, ribosomal proteins and eukaryotic initiation factors involved in translational control and the ones important for RBC invasion and cytoadherence also show strong accumulation of duplex RNA reads in various asexual stages. Intriguingly, our study determined a positive relationship between mRNA structural contents and translation efficiency in P. falciparum asexual blood stages, suggesting an essential role of RNA structural changes in malaria gene expression programs.