Partner study description

As part of his PhD project, Collins Morang’a collected asymptomatic and symptomatic individuals during the dry and wet season from Navrongo, respectively. Navrongo is a region of high malaria transmission in Ghana characterised by well-defined dry and wet seasons.

Asymptomatic malaria carriers harbour Plasmodium falciparum parasites, and they rarely have clinical symptoms, thus acting as a large silent reservoir of active malaria transmission between seasons. The purpose of his work was to investigate P. falciparum genome variation, infection diversity and determine genetic signatures of evolutionary selection in these parasite populations between groups and seasons. This work will identify genetic variants, copy number variations, and structural rearrangement associated with these essential clinical phenotypes.

Publications

• scRNA-Seq reveals elevated interferon responses and TNF-α signaling via NFkB in monocytes in children with uncomplicated malaria
  Morang'a et al
  medRxiv, 2024;
  10.1101/2023.06.02.23290878