PIR and malaria: The Plasmodium Interspersed Repeats (PIR) multi-gene family is one such family that is well conserved in the human malaria parasite Plasmodium vivax (vir, n = 245), the monkey parasite Plasmodium knowlesi (kir, n = 68) and the rodent malaria parasites Plasmodium berghei (bir, n = 245), Plasmodium chabaudi (cir, n = 135) and Plasmodium yoelii (yir, n = 838)[12,14-17].