Overview
Our initial work on malaria developed and utilized microsatellites for characterization of Plasmodium falciparum populations, which revealed dramatic differences in population structure that scale closely with transmission intensity. We recently observed comparable changes in genetic structure in a single population where transmission was declining. My lab has focused on the genetic composition of multiple clone infections, demonstrating that these consist of related parasite haplotypes, contradicting simple superinfection models of parasite transmission. This was recently confirmed by application of FACS-based single-cell genomics methods developed in my laboratory.