Much Ado About Malaria – TXBioBytes Episode 002

TXBiobytes from Texas Biomed

Dr. Cheeseman and his team are coming up with new ways to look at different strains of malaria. Alieu Dia, Ph.D. and Ian Cheeseman, Ph.D., use flow cytometry to study malaria parasites. Malaria is a mosquito-borne disease that kills hundreds of thousands of people around the world every year. Scientist Ian Cheeseman, Ph.D., of Texas Biomed specializes in the genetics of the parasite that causes malaria. His newest study published in the journal Genome Biology and Evolution was recently highlighted in the Editors Choice section of the prestigious journal Science. “At the basic level we simply do not know what’s in a malaria infection, even though this has profound implications for how we think about treating and eradicating this disease,” Cheeseman said. Using various technologies, these scientists are literally cracking open cells and using single cell DNA sequencing to discover previously unknown characteristics of malarial infections.