Antimalarial Drug Resistance Profiling of Plasmodium falciparum Infections in Ghana Using Molecular Inversion Probes and Next-Generation Sequencing
Benedicta Ayiedu Mensah, Özkan Aydemir, James L. Myers-Hansen, Millicent Opoku, Nicholas J. Hathaway, Patrick W. Marsh, Francis Anto, Jeffrey A. Bailey, Benjamin Abuaku, Anita Ghansah
Abstract
A key drawback to monitoring the emergence and spread of antimalarial drug resistance in sub-Saharan Africa is early detection and containment. Next-generation sequencing methods offer the resolution, sensitivity, and scale required to fill this gap by surveilling for molecular markers of drug resistance. We performed targeted sequencing using molecular inversion probes to interrogate five Plasmodium falciparum genes ( pfcrt , pfmdr1 , pfdhps , pfdhfr , and pfk13 ) implicated in chloroquine, sulfadoxine-pyrimethamine (SP), and artemisinin resistance in two sites in Ghana.