Abstract Pierre Marcel Durand and Theresa Louise Coetzer

Department of Molecular Medicine and Haematology, University of the Witwatersrand and National Health Laboratory Service, Johannesburg, South Africa.

Abstract

Apoptosis is the phenotypic result of an active, regulated process of self-destruction. Following various cellular insults, apoptosis has been demonstrated in numerous unicellular eukaryotes, but very little is known about the genes and proteins that initiate and execute this process in this group of organisms. A bioinformatic approach presents an array of powerful methods to direct investigators in the identification of the apoptosis machinery in protozoans. In this review, we discuss some of the available computational methods and illustrate how they may be applied using the identification of a Plasmodium falciparum metacaspase gene as an example.

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