Biomimetic Synthesis of the Plasmodium falciparum Malaria Pigment and Engineering of its Physical Attributes via pH Control

Although preventable and curable if diagnosed early, malaria still represents a life-threatening illness affecting over 200 million people every year with a significant mortality rate (2.4%). Research for the development of convenient and rapid diagnostic methods have recently shown promise in using the magneto-optical properties of the hemozoin compound, an iron-rich by-product excreted by malaria parasites, most notably the Plasmodium falciparum species, during ingestion of hemoglobin in the host’s blood. However, much research is still required in order to fully understand and exploit the properties of the hemozoin toward early-onset diagnosis of the illness. In this regard, access to an innocuous and controllable synthetic form of hemozoin (SHz) would be an invaluable tool to promote research in this area. The present work describes a straightforward aqueous acid-catalyzed technique for producing SHz with controlled dimensions and magnetic response that result in SHz samples with properties similar to natural hemozoin caused by Plasmodium falciparum. In particular, the results indicate that SHz with the closest resemblance to the natural hemozoin exhibits a paramagnetic response with magnetic susceptibility of 1.4E−5 and a refractive index of 1.7035 along the preferred crystallographic growth direction at 635 nm wavelength. The findings reported in this study provide new insights relevant to magneto-optic biomedical sensing and biochemical synthesis methods.