Relationship of circulating Plasmodium falciparum lifecycle stage to circulating parasitemia and total parasite biomass.

While that was a principal focus of our study, Thomson-Luque et al. interpreted our manuscript as reporting I var i gene expression was reduced in severe cases when in fact we reported that "There was no difference between severe malaria and uncomplicated malaria in total var gene expression"[1]. Thomson-Luque et al. themselves showed that the genes that we identified as upregulated in severe malaria were not expressed earlier than the genes upregulated in uncomplicated malaria (Thomson-Luque et al. Thomson-Luque et al. used our mixture model to estimate parasite stage in multiple datasets and showed inverse correlations between these estimates of parasite age and circulating parasitemias. [Extracted from the article]