Recent advances and perspectives on tropical diseases: Malaria

Figure 1 Plasmodium life cycle. A: In the human host, infected female Anopheles mosquitoes inject the sporozoite form of the parasite during a blood meal. Sporozoites reach the liver through the bloodstream, where they proliferate asexually, and then, as merozoites, invade red blood cells, evolve and eventually generate male and female gametocytes which are transmitted back to the mosquito; B: In the mosquito vector, gametocytes fuse to form zygotes and differentiate to form oocysts that duly divide to create sporozoites in the mosquito midgut. These migrate to the salivary glands, where the cycle of infection starts again.