Among these samples, interestingly, three isolates with higher parasitemia, i.e. A15, A16 and A19, exclusively transcribed dominant upsA subgroup vars (p<0.01) (Figure 3 and Table 1), while the var-DBL1α sequences cloned from their genomic DNAs did not indicate a higher proportion of upsA var genes (data not shown). Here, VARS1 is linked to parasitic infectious disease.