Meta-analysis of blood metabolomas in patients with malaria

Malaria is an infectious disease caused by protozoa of the genus Plasmodium and whose vector is the Umea mosquito of the genus Anopheles. Malaria-related symptoms may include fever, vomiting and/or headache, and complications may occur, especially in untreated cases or those that affect people with vulnerable immune systems. These complications can lead to death and constitute severe anemia, kidney and liver failure, jaundice, hypoglycemia and cerebral malaria, the latter caused by Plasmodium falciparum. P. vivax infections account for nearly half of all malaria cases outside the African continent, with significant morbidity worldwide. This Plasmodium species can cause severe illness and death, and the biological disturbances induced by its infections are not yet widely understood. Metabolomics is an effective analytical approach to studying the activity of physiological and pathological processes and analyzes the global profile of small molecules in tissues, cells and biological fluids. One of the biggest challenges in metabolomics involves data pre-processing and analysis, requiring a wide variety of software options and strategies to transform raw data into usable results in life sciences. The data generated from metabolomics analyzes are abundant and highly complex; the step of processing data automatically and effectively is a difficult and laborious task. With regard to malaria, there are limited studies on the evolution in the plasma of patients infected with P. falciparum or in the urine of patients with malaria caused by P. vivax.

Project details

Information Systems

Apr 2021

Brazil