Modeling and targeting an essential metabolic pathway of Plasmodium falciparum in apicoplast using Petri nets

Petri net (PN) is one of the promising computational and mathematical formalisms used to represent and study the behavior of complex metabolic networks. The various available analysis techniques of PN could be used to validate and analyze the network in different scenarios. Plasmodium falciparum is one of the threatening parasites which causes malaria, a deadly disease affecting a large number of today’s world population. The development of antimalarial drug resistance is an emerging global threat, highlighting the need to discover novel antimalarial targets. The fatty acid biosynthesis of malarial parasite is one of the essential metabolic pathways required for its growth and is present in apicoplast, a non-photosynthetic plastid. The malarial parasite obtains fatty acids by using type two fatty acid synthase (FAS II) enzyme, which is different from type one enzyme used by human host, making it an ideal drug target. This article proposes and studies the PN model of the parasite’s FAS II pathway to analyze the mechanism of potential drug targets in this pathway. The proposed PN model can serve as a base for further findings in the field of antimalarial drug targets to decrease the malaria mortality rate.