WELCOME

Malaria is caused by single-celled parasites that replicate inside red blood cells, and that naturally can only be transmitted by mosquitoes. We want to reveal the hidden and fascinating biology of these important organisms, so that it can be exploited by new drugs and vaccines.

One way to make new discoveries, is not to rely on preconceived ideas. We have therefore developed new molecular tools to interrogate the functions of thousands of parasite genes simultaneously and in an unbiased manner. We now conduct genome-scale genetic screens in Plasmodium berghei, a species of parasite that only infects rodents and that we can study safely and easily at all stages of its life cycle. We transfer concepts for the effective discovery of gene functions from model organisms like yeast, to malaria parasites. This will help unlock important areas of parasite cell biology, from the regulation of development and transmission, to parasite-host-mosquito interactions.

In our lab at the Wellcome Trust Sanger Institute http://www.sanger.ac.uk/people/directory/billker-oliver in Cambridge (UK) we do much tool development. We work closely with Dr. Julian Rayner and Dr. Marcus Lee and with their teams with the aims of scaling up Plasmodium genetics and generating molecular tools for the research community.

To conduct genome scale screens in P. berghei we will soon open a new laboratory at Umeå University http://www.umu.se/english/ in northern Sweden. Umeå has long been a centre of excellence for pathogen research and hosts Molecular Infection Medicine Sweden http://www.mims.umu.se/, a member of the Nordic EMBL Partnership for Molecular Medicine https://www.embl.de/research/partnerships/remote/nordic/ .