Malaria is a tropical parasitic disease caused by the Plasmodium genus, which resulted in an estimated 219 million cases of malaria and 435 000 malaria-related deaths in 2017. Despite the availability of the Plasmodium falciparum genome since 2002, 74% of the genes remain uncharacterized. To remedy this paucity of functional information, we used transcriptomic data to build gene co-expression networks for two Plasmodium species (P. falciparum and P. berghei), and included genomic data of four other Plasmodium species, P. yoelii, P. knowlesi, P. vivax and P. cynomolgi, as well as two non-Plasmodium species from the Apicomplexa, Toxoplasma gondii and Theileria parva. The genomic and transcriptomic data were incorporated into the resulting database, malaria.tools, which is preloaded with tools that allow the identification and cross-species comparison of co-expressed gene neighbourhoods, clusters and life stage-specific expression, thus providing sophisticated tools to predict gene function. Moreover, we exemplify how the tools can be used to easily identify genes relevant for pathogenicity and various life stages of the malaria parasite. The database is freely available at www.malaria.tools.

中文翻译：

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疟原虫种类的Malaria.tools比较基因组和转录组数据库。

疟疾是由疟原虫属引起的一种热带寄生虫病，2017年估计导致2.19亿例疟疾病例和435 000例与疟疾有关的死亡。尽管自2002年以来可获得恶性疟原虫基因组，但74％的基因仍未鉴定。为了弥补这种缺乏功能性信息的不足，我们使用了转录组学数据来构建两个疟原虫物种（恶性疟原虫和伯氏疟原虫）的基因共表达网络，并包括了其他四个疟原虫物种的遗传学数据，即约氏疟原虫，诺氏疟原虫。 ，间日疟原虫和食蟹疟原虫，以及来自蚜虫复合体的两种非疟原虫物种，弓形虫和Theileria parva。基因组和转录组数据已整合到生成的数据库malaria.tools，其中预装了工具，这些工具可用于共表达的基因邻域，聚类和生命阶段特异性表达的鉴定和跨物种比较，从而提供了预测基因功能的先进工具。此外，我们举例说明了如何使用这些工具轻松识别与疟原虫的致病性和各个生命阶段相关的基因。该数据库可从www.malaria.tools免费获得。