The present invention is directed to recombinant DNA technology and immunology, particularly antigens and related vaccines for prevention of malarial infection. The present invention includes novel recombinant malarial proteins, and fragments of the same, that have unique structural and/or chemical properties that allow them to be expressed in greater quantity in heterologous systems. These recombinant proteins and fragments have immunogenic properties superior to malarial proteins expressed using different expression systems and coding sequences, but having the same primary amino acid sequence.