Malaria parasites face dynamically changing environments and strong selective constraints within human and mosquito hosts. To survive such hostile and shifting conditions, Plasmodium switches transcriptional programs during development and has evolved mechanisms to adjust its phenotype through heterogeneous patterns of gene expression. In vitro studies on culture-adapted isolates have served to set the link between chromatin structure and functional gene expression. Yet, experimental evidence is limited to certain stages of the parasite in the vertebrate, i.e. blood, while the precise mechanisms underlying the dynamic regulatory landscapes during development and in the adaptation to within-host conditions remain poorly understood. In this review, we discuss available data on transcriptional and epigenetic regulation in Plasmodium mosquito stages in the context of sporogonic development and phenotypic variation, including both bet-hedging and environmentally triggered direct transcriptional responses. With this, we advocate the mosquito offers an in vivo biological model to investigate the regulatory networks, transcription factors and chromatin-modifying enzymes and their modes of interaction with regulatory sequences, which might be responsible for the plasticity of the Plasmodium genome that dictates stage- and cell type-specific blueprints of gene expression.

中文翻译：

---

疟原虫在蚊子宿主中的第二个生命：移动中的基因调控。

疟原虫面临着动态变化的环境以及人类和蚊子寄主内强烈的选择性限制。为了在这种不利和不断变化的条件下生存，疟原虫在发育过程中会切换转录程序，并且已经进化出通过基因表达的异质模式来调节其表型的机制。对培养物适应分离株的体外研究有助于建立染色质结构与功能基因表达之间的联系。然而，实验证据仅限于脊椎动物中寄生虫的某些阶段，即血液，而在发育过程中以及对宿主内部条件的适应过程中动态调控景观背后的确切机制仍知之甚少。在这篇评论中 我们讨论了在孢子虫发育和表型变异的背景下，在疟原虫蚊子阶段转录和表观遗传调控的可用数据，包括对冲和环境触发的直接转录反应。因此，我们提倡蚊子提供一种体内生物学模型，以研究调节网络，转录因子和染色质修饰酶及其与调节序列的相互作用方式，这可能是疟原虫基因组可塑性的决定因素，以及基因表达的细胞类型特异性蓝图。