OBJECT-ORIENTED DESIGN AND UI PROTOTYPING OF A BIOINFORMATICS FRAMEWORK FOR NGS VARIANT DETECTION AND ANNOTATION IN PLASMODIUM FALCIPARUM ISOLATES FROM SICKLE CELL PATIENTS

The coevolution between sickle cell disease and malaria illustrates a major mechanism of natural selection in which the hemoglobin S allele confers protection against severe forms of infection. In HbAS and HbSS carriers, however, the altered red-cell milieu also pressures P. falciparum itself and can favor particular parasite genotypes. Next-generation sequencing (NGS) is particularly well-suited for monitoring this interaction, as it allows for the identification of parasite mutations and potential adaptive changes with high precision. In practice, libraries derived from blood consist mainly of human DNA; therefore, to obtain reliable results regarding the parasite, it is necessary to use processes that remove host-related background noise beforehand. This article presents the object-oriented design approach and GUI prototyping of a proposed bioinformatics framework developed using the Unified Modeling Language (UML) as part of the DREPAL project (sickle cell disease and malaria). The work aims to structure the IPCINGSTOOLKIT platform for in silico host decontamination, variant detection, and annotation,thereby contributing to comparative analysis of Plasmodium falciparum genomes and to the identification of functional adaptations according to sickle cell genotype.