Malaria kills more than a million people a year — or at least one person every 30 seconds — almost all of them in sub-Saharan Africa.

The announcement this week that sequencing of the genome of Plasmodium falciparum, the deadliest malaria parasite, is complete, could generate new approaches and targets for drug and vaccine discovery.

But, as Declan Butler reports in this feature article, the availability of the P. falciparum genome does not herald the parasite’s impending doom.

Link to Nature feature article

Reference: Nature 419, 426 (2002)