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Molecular infection biology of parasite-host interaction and adaptation

Parasitic diseases constitute a tremendous burden with enormous public health, social and economic impacts world-wide. Central obstacles to efficient combatting of these diseases are the parasites remarkable ability to rapidly adapt to changes, including therapeutic efforts, within the human host. Understanding how this adaptation is brought about is vital for continued attempts to eliminate and eradicate these diseases.

We mainly work on the malaria parasite Plasmodium falciparum, which is one of the most important human pathogens in the world but also on the explosive diarrhea causing Giardia intestinalis, which is similarly a pathogen of humans but also an early branching eukaryote in the tree of life. This work integrates molecular parasitology and cell biology to understand how the parasites interact with cells and adapt to changing milieus within the host in their attempts to establish chronic infections and successful transmission. In the lab we perform global transcriptome, proteome and metabolome analyses of both parasites and host and focus on the molecular basis for gene regulation within the parasites with the aim of identifying new regulatory mechanisms and therapeutic targets. We are in particular interested in scrutinizing the host molecular response to parasite infections, decoding how parasites adapt to changing milieus within the human host and understanding the biogenesis, evolution and role of parasite ncRNA in this adaptation.

We are a multidisciplinary and collaborative research team within the fields of parasitology, RNA biology and genetics and highly engaged in field-projects with collaborators in Uganda and Rwanda to maintain a high clinical relevance of our research.