Dr Mara Lawniczak

Malaria still kills hundreds of thousands of children every year in Africa. I’m interested in all aspects of what makes an Anopheles female mosquito such an effective vector of this deadly parasite, from her genotype to her life history. Likewise, I'm interested in how parasites behave in the human host and in the mosquito to increase their chances of transmission.

We carry out large scale whole genome sequencing projects on mosquitoes, and we are focused on a deeper understanding of diversity in African vectors in particular. We lead the Anopheles funestus population genomics project, partnered with many scientists in Africa, to evaluate diversity and selection in this important but often overlooked species. This is one of many daughter projects of the MalariaGEN Vector Observatory, a major effort at Sanger to do population genomics for all major vectors.

Many species of Anopheles are very difficult to keep as colonies or to inbreed and these facts cause all sorts of problems for building good assemblies using current technology. Therefore, we are also leading a project to use wild caught individuals and their broods to assemble high quality reference genomes from multiple major and secondary vectors.This is in collaboration with Richard Durbin at Cambridge and Dan Neafsey at Harvard/Broad.

Our other major area of research is around using single cell RNA sequencing to investigate transmission dynamics in Plasmodium. We created the Malaria Cell Atlas, a data resource that will continue to grow as we expand our efforts to examine indivdiual parasite transcriptomes in the context of both lab and natural infections.

All areas of our research are aimed at gaining a deep evolutionary understanding of these interesting yet deadly organisms, and ultimately our research and the data we generate will help to implement new methods of control, including gene drive and transmission blocking strategies that aim to stop malaria.