Fig. 3

Time to adaptation varied predictively and reproducibly between different patient isolates. a A comparison of pairwise time-to-adaptation for parasites from direct blood draws versus from cryopreservation. Parasite samples that were subjected to immediate adaptation after a blood draw showed the same ranked-tendencies compared to cryopreserved immediately after blood draw from the patients, when tested together months later in identical media and identical host RBCs, the isolates showed roughly the same ranking in ease to adaptation. The fastest adapting parasites from some fresh patient blood draws (to the left) adapted as quickly as 8 days in culture (e.g., CA1 and CA14), others (e.g., CA15, CA16, CA19) took 15–20 days in culture, and yet others (NA4 and NA11) did not adapt at all. For this work, blinded, duplicate samples were adapted by each of two different scientists in the laboratory. Samples with a history of anti-malarial treatment or prolonged exposure to room temperature before sample processing were left out (see “Results”). b Cryopreserved parasites from individual patient isolates show large but reproducible variations in time to adaptation. For each cryopreserved patient parasite isolate, the vertical line inside a box represents the mean number of days to adaptation. The box around the vertical line represents the full spread of days to adaptation for that parasite isolate. The raw data is shown in Table 2