Debugging parasite genomes: Using metabolic modeling to accelerate antiparasitic drug development

Eukaryotic parasites, like the casual agent of malaria, kill over one million people around the world annually. There is a pressing need for novel antiparasitic drugs because there are few available therapeutics and the parasites have developed drug resistance. However, novel drug targets are challenging to identify due to poor genome annotation and experimental challenges associated with growing these parasites. Here, we focus on computational and experimental approaches that generate high-confidence hypotheses to accelerate labor-intensive experimental work and leverage existing experimental data to generate new drug targets. We generate genome-scale metabolic models for over 100 species to develop a parasite knowledgebase and apply these models to contextualize experimental data and to generate candidate drug targets.