Fig. 5

Severe malaria metabolites do not immediately alter gametocytogenesis regulation. Gene expression analysis during the late schizont stage for the gametocytogenesis master regulators PfAP2-G (a), gexp02 (b), sbp1 (c) and rhoph2 (d). In the case of PfAP2-G, the NF54-gexp02-tdTomato line was used as a control to illustrate choline treatment success (a, right panel). NF54 Pf parasites were cultured under choline removal (− Choline) or supplementation (+ Choline) conditions and exposed to lactate 5 mM or kynurenic acid 250 nM for 16 h. RNA was extracted at this time point only and gene expression analyzed by robot-automatized RT-qPCR. Data were normalized to uce. Error bars represent SD. Two-way ANOVA with post-hoc tests were run using estimated marginal means with the R package 'emmeans.' The significance presented in the figure corresponds to the two-way ANOVA for the “choline presence” factor. All the individual post-hoc contrasts were not significant, and not shown. ns = p ≥ 0.05 (non-significant), *p < 0.05 and ****p ≤ 0.0001