Nature Genetics44:1051-1055 2012/08/05

Plasmodium vivax, thought to have become a human parasite by host switch from an Asian Old World monkey (OWM) malaria parasite, has lost the ability to infect OWMs. Since P. cynomolgi is closely related to P. vivax and possesses many of its biologic characteristics, to gain insights into P. vivax-specific genomic changes we sequenced the genome of P. cynomolgi. Comparative genomics show that P. vivax and related OWM malaria parasites are mostly characterized by copy number variations in multigene families. Interestingly, we found that specific gene loss in the reticulocyte/normocyte binding protein gene family may be associated with host selection.