Background: pfmdr1 and its variants are molecular marker which are responsible for antibiotics resistance in Plasmodium falciparum, a parasitic carrier for malaria dis-ease. A novel strategy to treat malaria disease is by disrupting parasite lactate dehy-drogenase (pLDH), a crucial enzyme for Plasmodium survival during their erythro-cytic stages. This research was aimed to investigate and characterize the pfmdr1 and pldh genes of P. falciparum isolated from Nusa Tenggara Indonesia.
Methods: Genomic DNA of P.falciparum was isolated from malaria patients in Nusa Tenggara Indonesia. pfmdr1 was amplified using nested PCR and genotyped using Restriction Fragment Length Polymorphism (RFLP). pldh was amplified, se-quenced, and analyzed using NCBI public domain databases and alignment using Clustal W ver. 1.83.
Results: Genotyping of the pfmdr1 revealed that sequence diversity was extremely high among isolates. However, a sequence analysis of pldh indicated that open read-ing frame of 316 amino acids of the gene showing 100% homology to the P. falcipa-rum 3D7 reference pldh (GeneBank: XM_001349953.1).
Conclusion: This is the first report which confirms the heterologous of pfmdr1 and the homologous sequences of P.falciparum pldh isolated from Nusa Tenggara Islands of Indonesia, indicating that the chloroquine could not be used effectively as anti-malarial target in the region and the pLDH-targeted antimalarial compound would have higher chance to be successful than using chloroquine for curbing malaria worldwide.