Maintenance of the Plasmodium berghei Life Cycle

Plasmodium berghei was probably first described in 1946 by Vincke in blood films of the stomach contents of Anopheles dureni. In 1948, it was subsequently found in blood films of Grammomys surdaster collected in Kisanga, Katanga; blood was passaged to white rats and became the K173 strain made widely available by the Institute for Tropical Medicine in Antwerp. A trio of fascinating papers describing the discovery and early analysis of the biology of P. berghei (1-3) give an early indication of the natural and catholic host range of this parasite (Table 1), a property that possibly underlies the successful transmission of the parasite to a variety of laboratory hosts. Although the natural vector of P. berghei is A. dureni, early laboratory studies (3,4) showed that a wide range of colonized mosquitoes would successfully transmit the parasite (Table 2).