Meet the scientists!

Parasites fascinate me.  They come in many shapes and sizes, from microscopic malaria parasites in the blood to very long tapeworm in your gut.  They also cause a massive cause range of disease from deadly malaria, to face-destroying Leishmania.  On the other hand, some them do nothing apart from live inside you for years or decades.  In my work, we try to learn as much as possible about each parasite by using computers to look at their DNA code.  By comparing the DNA from different parasites we can find clues as to what makes two parasites so similar or so different.

 We start with some DNA from mashed-up parasites and prepare it for sequencing – that’s the process where every letter of an organism’s DNA code is read.  We then try to piece together the letters  into their correct order.  After that, the fun bit is trying to figure what those letters mean. We use computer programs to find where the individual genes are and to make a best guess as to what they do.  When we’ve cracked the genome from one parasite (that’s all of its DNA sequence), we then compare it to the genome of other parasites.  Much of the DNA sequence in one parasite is very similar to that of another but where DNA is most different, we find clues into weird differences between the parasites themselves.