Sneaky HUGE PAPER ALERT!
Direct PNAS link here.
This is so so so cool. Here is the thing, PFEMP1 is this molecule that covers the surface of malaria parasites and it does something very similar to what our antibodies do. It switches domains around to that it is incredibly variable. For a while it was thought that because it's so huge (I forget but I think it's 600kDa or more) it might be able to switch around more than our antibodies.
Back in the 1990s or something the amazing Michal Fried was getting malaria samples from women in Africa who had gotten malaria while pregnant - multiple times. The first time was generally really bad. Like as bad as you could imagine, but if the adult survived the next time she was pregnant she and her baby were basically immune to all forms of Plasmodium falciparum malaria (maybe the others, I'm not sure). Those data basically proved that a malaria vaccine could one day be engineered and today we do have one. It's insanely absurdly difficult and expensive to produce, but it exists.
It also shows that the human mAB can outcompete PFEMP1...somehow.... and if we could just exploit that gap in flexibility between our immune system and the protective systems of the parasite - we could have much easier to produce vaccines.
But you can't sequence polyclonal human antibodies....right...? This team seems to have!
If you're interested in the story I mentioned above --
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