BackgroundThe Plasmodium falciparum apical membrane antigen-1 (PfAMA1) is considered as an ideal vaccine candidate for malaria control due to its high level of immunogenicity and essential role in parasite survival. Among the three domains of PfAMA1 protein, hyper-variable region (HVR) of domain I is the most immunogenic. The present study was conducted to evaluate the extent of genetic diversity across HVR domain I of the pfama1 gene in P. falciparum isolates from Hazara division of Pakistan.MethodsThe HVR domain I of the pfama1 was amplified and sequenced from 20 P. falciparum positive cases from Hazara division of Pakistan. The sequences were analysed in context of global population data of P. falciparum from nine malaria endemic countries. The DNA sequence reads quality assessment, reads assembling, sequences alignment/phylogenetic and population genetic analyses were performed using Staden, Lasergene v. 7.1, MEGA7 and DnaSP v.5 software packages respectively.ResultsTotal 14 mutations were found in Pakistani isolates with 12 parsimony informative sites. During comparison with global isolates, a novel non-synonymous mutation (Y240F) was found specifically in a single Pakistani sample with 5% frequency. The less number of mutations, haplotypes, recombination and low pairwise nucleotide differences revealed tightly linked uniform genetic structure with low genetic diversity at HVR domain I of pfama1 among P. falciparum isolates from Hazara region of Pakistan. This uniform genetic structure may be shaped across Pakistani P. falciparum isolates by bottleneck or natural selection events.ConclusionThe Pakistani P. falciparum isolates were found to maintain a distinct genetic pattern at HVR pfama1 with some extent of genetic relationship with geographically close Myanmar and Indian samples. However, the exact pattern of gene flow and demographic events may infer from whole genome sequence data with large sample size of P. falciparum collected from broad area of Pakistan.Electronic supplementary materialThe online version of this article (10.1186/s12936-018-2539-3) contains supplementary material, which is available to authorized users.
Aim: To assess the relationship between dental fear and smoking among adolescents of 15-18 year of age in Pakistan Method: This study was a prospective crossectional survey design which was conducted in Lahore. After taking permission from the school’s head, data was collected from the male students of grade 9th, 10th, 11th and 12th using questionnaire and later on one of their parents was approached to fill the questionnaire. For this purpose, only one school was targeted. Sample size was of 200 participants whereas parents of all the student participants participated in the study. Results: The results of chi-square revealed that dental fear was quite high among male students, occasional use of tobacco, and use of mouthwash minimum thrice a day. It was also found that students of those parents whose occupational level was low reported higher dental fear. Conclusion: It was found that adolescent male students were found to have more dental fear who smoke tobacco as compared to those who do not smoke. It is important to ask about smoking habits as well as dental fear when examining oral health maintenance of adolescents. Keywords: Smoking, Tobacco, Adolescents, Dental fear
scite is a Brooklyn-based organization that helps researchers better discover and understand research articles through Smart Citations–citations that display the context of the citation and describe whether the article provides supporting or contrasting evidence. scite is used by students and researchers from around the world and is funded in part by the National Science Foundation and the National Institute on Drug Abuse of the National Institutes of Health.