Please mention Nature Structural Biology as the source of these items 1.
Purines are the building blocks of DNA and thus, are essential for life.
These enzymes are targets for developing drugs against parasitic pathogens that lack de novo pathways for nucleotide synthesis. Such parasites rely on salvage pathways to obtain nucleotides from the host. Examples are insect-associated parasitic infections such as Plasmodia, which causes malaria, Trypanosoma, which causes West African sleeping sickness, and Leishmania. Each year, 300-500 million people become ill with malaria and several million die, most of whom are children under five. Because of the insect's increased resistance to pesticides there has been an increased effort to develop new anti-parasitic drugs such as nucleotide analogs that work as inhibitors, that is, molecules that 'look' like substrates of this enzyme but block its activity.