Moving on: How malaria parasites exit the liver

Abstract

An essential step in the life cycle of malaria parasites is their egress from hepatocytes, which enables the transition from the asymptomatic liver stage to the pathogenic blood stage of infection. To exit the liver, Plasmodium parasites first disrupt the parasitophorous vacuole membrane that surrounds them during their intracellular replication. Subsequently, parasite‐filled structures called merosomes emerge from the infected cell. Shrouded by host plasma membrane, like in a Trojan horse, parasites enter the vasculature undetected by the host immune system and travel to the lung where merosomes rupture, parasites are released, and the blood infection stage begins. This complex, multi‐step process must be carefully orchestrated by the parasite and requires extensive manipulation of the infected host cell. This review aims to outline the known signaling pathways that trigger exit, highlight Plasmodium proteins that contribute to the release of liver‐stage merozoites, and summarize the accompanying changes to the hepatic host cell.

Mechanisms of host cell exit by intracellular pathogens

“…In this issue, various articles provide novel insight into molecules involved during host cell exit by Plasmodium and Toxoplasma, like phospholipases (Pietsch et al, 2023), zinc-finger proteins (Farrukh et al, 2023), cytoskeletal elements (Beyeler et al, 2023) or vesicle-resident factors (Sassmannshausen et al, 2023) and plasma membrane-bound proteins (Jennison et al, 2023;Thieleke-Matos et al, 2024). In addition, two reviews summarize apicomplexan exit strategies (Jimenéz-Ruiz et al, 2023;Scheiner et al, 2023). Three more research articles and a review deal with the lytic vacuolar exit by the bacterial pathogens Legionella (Hiller et al, 2023;Neuber et al, 2023), Rhodococcus (Nehls et al, 2024), Salmonella (Scharte et al, 2023), and Staphylococcus (Bayer et al, 2023).…”