Growth, drug susceptibility, and gene expression profiling of Plasmodium falciparum cultured in medium supplemented with human serum

In vitro cultivation of Plasmodium falciparum has been extremely useful in understanding the biology of the human malaria parasite as well as research on the discovery of new antimalarial drugs and vaccines. A chemically defined serum-free medium supplemented with lipid-rich bovine serum albumin (AlbuMAX I) offers the following advantages over human serum-supplemented media for the in vitro culture of P. falciparum: 1) improved growth profile, with more than a 2-fold higher yield of the parasites at any stage of the growth cycle; 2) suitability for in vitro antimalarial screening, as the parasites grown in AlbuMAX and human serum-supplemented media show similar sensitivity to standard and novel antimalarials as well as natural product extracts in the in vitro drug susceptibility assays; and 3) DNA microarray analysis comparing the global gene expression profile of sorbitol-synchronized P. falciparum trophozoites grown in the 2 different media, indicating minimal differences.