Transcriptional profiling of hepatocytes infected with the replicative form of the malaria parasite Plasmodium cynomolgi

The zoonotic simian parasite Plasmodium cynomolgi develops into replicating schizonts and dormant hypnozoites during the infection of hepatocytes and is used as a model organism to study relapsing malaria. We previously reported the transcriptional profiling of P. cynomolgi liver stages and revealed many important biological features of the parasite (Bertschi et al., Elife, 2018; Voorberg-van der Wel et al., Elife, 2017) but left out the host response to malaria infection. Here, we used our published RNA sequencing data to quantify the expression of host genes in rhesus macaque hepatocytes infected with P. cynomolgi in comparison to either cells from uninfected samples or uninfected bystander cells. Although the dataset could not be used to resolve the transcriptional profile of hypnozoite-infected hepatocytes, it provided a snapshot of the host response to liver stage schizonts and identified specific host pathways that are modulated during malaria infection. This study constitutes a valuable resource characterizing the hepatocyte response to P. cynomolgi infection and provides a framework to build on future research that aims at understanding hepatocyte-parasite interactions during relapsing malaria infection.