Isolation and characterization of a chaperonin-60 gene of the human malaria parasite Plasmodium falciparum.

We report the isolation and sequence of genomic clones encoding a chaperonin 60 gene from the human malaria parasite Plasmodium falciparum. The gene contains a single intron of 868 nucleotides, the largest yet identified in this organism. The reading frame encodes a product with a predicted length of 719 amino acid residues (81.6 kDa), which is considerably longer than any chaperonin 60 protein sequenced to date, revealing good identity with other chaperonin 60 proteins. There is a putative mitochondrial signal peptide and an usually long carboxy terminus composed almost entirely of glutamic and aspartic acid residues. The gene was located on chromosome 12, and a 4-kb transcript was identified.