A Comparative Study of Diamond Nucleic Acid Dye and SYBR Green I in Detecting Plasmodium falciparum

Plasmodium falciparum detection to ensure complete elimination is an important task that many countries still have to accomplish. The elimination requires constant strategic efforts and mass testing of drugs in the laboratories. Antimalarial investigations in in-vitro conditions rely on enzymatic assays and nucleic acid determination by SYBR™ Green I dye-based fluorescence assay. SYBR™ Green I dye is currently used by many laboratories, but it is expensive. In this study, an effort was made to use a cost-effective Diamond™ nucleic acid dye to determine IC₅₀ values of the antimalarial standard drugs with the comparative analysis with SYBR™ Green I dye. The study suggested that the IC₅₀ values obtained from the two dyes were comparable and concentration-dependent with all the standard antimalarial drugs. Further, the investigation also revealed that the sensitivity of the standard dye concentration is respective to the percentage of parasitemia at different stages of the parasites. The study revealed that diamond nucleic acid dye can be used as an alternate dye for in-vitro investigations of antimalarial drugs for checking malaria parasite growth at a very low cost. The study suggests diamond nucleic acid dye can be used in in-vitro assays to investigate and determine the growth of Plasmodium parasites.