“…The loss of gametocyte production in lab strains is frequently associated with Gdv1 deletions ( Tiburcio et al., 2021 ), while GDV1 overexpression increases gametocyte production ( Eksi et al., 2012 ; Filarsky et al., 2018 ). Field populations also exhibit high gdv1 allelic divergence that has been suggested to vary with transmission patterns ( Mobegi et al., 2014 ; Bungei et al., 2020 ). Ap2-g was also identified as the target of mutations in gametocyte-deficient parasite lines in both P. falciparum ( Kafsack et al., 2014 ) and P. berghei ( Sinha et al., 2014 ).…”