gms | German Medical Science

The Plasmodium vivax affects populations of Central America, South America, Middle East, South, Southeast and Central Asia, Oceania and East Africa, where 3.3 billion people are currently at risk of infection and 70–80 million clinical cases are reported each year. Previous studies have contrasted the genetic diversity of parasite populations in the Americas with those in Asia and Oceania, concluding that New World populations exhibit low genetic diversity consistent with a recent introduction. In this study we sequenced the complete mitochondrial genome of 52 isolates of P. vivax from Papua New Guinea to investigate the genetic diversity present in this region. The network of mtDNA haplotypes was constructed using the program Network, combining 721 genome sequences available in the GenBank database with 52 sequences from Papua New Guinea. We identified 360 distinct haplotypes, including 3 haplotypes not found in earlier surveys of global mitochondrial diversity in P. vivax. Our Network analysis suggests that isolates from Papua New Guinea are divided in sub-populations. The first PNG sub-population is closely related to isolates from South America, predominantly those from Venezuela, Peru, Colombia and Brazil, and also related to African isolates in particular from Madagascar. Another sub-population from PNG is dispersed in the network, related mitochondrial DNAs are of diverse origin, for example, from Central America, South America (Brazil predominately), Southeast Asia, South Asia, China and Korean. Up the present, there is no definitive conclusion about the arrival of P. vivax in Oceania, but genetic data suggest that this continent was probably colonized by P. vivax at multiple time points. This could explain the finding of two groups of haplotypes in PNG, each of these with distinct relationships within the haplotype network.