Year: 2008
Type: article
Abstract: Malaria is a significant cause of mortality in the tropical regions of the world, such as Papua New Guinea (PNG).Efforts to combat malaria are impeded by the development of drug resistant mutants.We generated a model describing the chemical and molecular properties of the ligase detection reaction (LDR) fluorescent microsphere assay (FMA) for single nucleotide polymorphism (SNP) detection and employed numerical optimization techniques to determine the parameters of this model.First, we implemented the Levenberg-Marquardt Nonlinear Least Squares (NLLS) algorithm and estimated the model parameters from simulated data representing a control dilution/mixing experiment.Second, we used these parameters as well as parameters estimated from experimental data to generate possible distributions of parasite concentration.These distributions can, in principle, inform us of how drug resistance is distributed in a given sample and throughout PNG communities in general.Furthermore, they allow us to evaluate a drug's effectiveness in that community.vii
Author: Drew Kouri
Institution: Case Western Reserve University
Language: English
Topic: Malaria Research and Control
Field: Medicine
Domain: Health Sciences
Open Access status: green
OpenAlex ID: W2185259619