Reply to Roepe, “The collective creativity of Drs. Baro, Pooput, and Callaghan”
Iqbal Taliy Junaid, Ashutosh Panda, Arunaditya Deshmukh, Rahila Sardar, Monika Narwal, Prakhar Agrawal, Neha Prakash, Asif Akhtar, Amit Kumar Dey, Suneet Shekhar Singh, Saptarshi Mridha, Jigneshkumar Mochi, Sadaf Parveen, Mohit Kumar, Rashi Nagar, Naseem Gaur, Dinesh Gupta

Abstract
Genes, proteins, chemicals, diseases, species, mutations and cell lines named across the full text — each resolved to its canonical identifier and authoritative record.
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TopicsEmpathy and Medical Education · History of Medical Practice · Mental Health and Psychiatry
REPLY
We acknowledge Dr. Paul D. Roepe’s concern regarding citation of earlier foundational studies describing codon-optimized back-translation of Plasmodium transporter genes, heterologous expression in Saccharomyces cerevisiae, and drug susceptibility evaluation using yeast spotting and growth assays, which were pioneered and refined by his laboratory (1). We fully agree that these contributions represent important methodological advances in transporter functional studies, and we appreciate the opportunity to recognize this prior work explicitly (2–4).
Dr. Roepe also notes that PfAAT1 (a digestive vacuole-localized transporter implicated in chloroquine resistance evolution) was not detected or discussed in our study. We appreciate this observation and acknowledge that proteome-based detection of FV-resident proteins can be influenced by multiple factors, including abundance, extraction efficiency, membrane association strength, and technical limitations of the purification workflow. However, it was not captured in our data set by both the methods.
We understand his concern and believe that these additions will be useful for the next set of studies for understanding the link between other transporters and drug resistance.
The reference list from the paper itself. Each links out to its DOI / PubMed record.
- 1Roepe PD. 2026. The collective creativity of Drs. Baro, Pooput, and Callaghan. Antimicrob Agents Chemother 70:e 01943-25. doi:10.1128/aac.01943-2541837607 · doi ↗ · pubmed ↗
- 2Baro NK, Pooput C, Roepe PD. 2011. Analysis of chloroquine resistance transporter (CRT) isoforms and orthologues in S. cerevisiae yeast. Biochemistry 50:6701–6710. doi:10.1021/bi 200922 g 21744797 PMC 3155940 · doi ↗ · pubmed ↗
- 3Baro NK, Callaghan P, Roepe PD. 2013. Analysis of naturally occurring P. falciparum chloroquine resistance transporter (Pf CRT) isoforms in S. cerevisiae yeast. Biochemistry 52:4242–4249. doi:10.1021/bi 400557 x 23688277 PMC 3703759 · doi ↗ · pubmed ↗
- 4Callaghan PS, Hassett MR, Roepe PD. 2015. Functional comparison of 45 naturally occurring isoforms of the Plasmodium falciparum chloroquine resistance transporter (Pf CRT). Biochemistry 54:5083–5094. doi:10.1021/acs.biochem.5b 0041226208441 PMC 5070608 · doi ↗ · pubmed ↗
