A new paper just came out in PNAS with our collaborators in the University of Melbourne. This paper aims to discover how diverse malaria parasites are in children from an African village. Using DNA sequencing of var genes, we show that they are highly diverse such that every child practically has a malaria infection with a different set of these genes. Importantly, this paper shows by computational methods that the pattern of this diversity is not random but structured to enhance the parasites’ chance to evade host immunity and has implications for the success of malaria control programs.

The paper has received much media coverage on Medical Express, Science Life, Bloomberg and Futurity.