Background
malaria, early-life malaria, mosquito-borne communicable disease, Malaria
MALARIA, DISEASE, PATHOGENESIS, MALARIA
Malaria is a mosquito-borne communicable disease caused by protists of the The natural host of these parasite species is humans, and because of the selective evolutionary pressures applied by the parasite in its dependency on the human host, many natural genetic resistance mechanisms to malaria have evolved in humans. Traditionally, various well-studied haematologic phenotypes have established mechanisms of defence against This study utilized a candidate gene approach to identifying genotype-phenotype associations between susceptibility genes and malaria. Of the identified genes, protein-coding genes that played a role in malarial pathogenesis were prioritized for analysis, focusing on those that encoded for cell-surface proteins utilized by Of these, the gene encoding Toll-Like Receptor 4 (TLR4) was found to be of particular interest, and this article focuses on the role TLR plays in the host immune response against It is imperative to understand the aetiology of malaria disease regarding parasite, host, and environment, such that the global burden of malaria can be reduced, or the disease eradicated. To address the hypothesis that candidate genes are associated with clinical malaria, this longitudinal study was conducted to investigate a curated set of human single nucleotide polymorphisms (SNPs) in candidate genes that demonstrated associations between host maternal and children SNPs and early-life malaria susceptibility.