Attacking blood-borne parasites with mathematics

Central carbon metabolism is important to cells as it supplies free energy in the form of ATP and the building blocks for new cells. Parasites harvest many of the components they require from their hosts, but they still have to generate ATP themselves, making the metabolic pathways that generate ATP essential to the parasites' survival and thereby potential target pathways for antiparasitic drugs. Metabolic networks often consist of many components that interact with each other via nonlinear kinetics.The behavior of the network arises from the interaction of the components within and outside the network. To understand network behavior, experimental measurements on the components should be integrated through computational approaches. In this chapter, we present an overview of how experiment-driven mathematical models have provided insights on important aspects of parasite metabolism and have aided in elucidating potent antiparasitic drug targets within metabolism.