Life in the Lab: working in a malaria genome modification pipeline

Frank Schwach is a senior computational biologist, working in the Malaria Programme at the Wellcome Trust Sanger Institute. In this film he gives an overview of the main processes involved in developing and creating malaria vectors as part of the PlasmoGEM project. Frank discusses how he develops software to create DNA sequences used to modify the DNA of the Plasmodium parasite that causes malaria. He also outlines some of the processes involved in creating the vectors in the lab, ready for use by scientists around the world.

The Malaria Programme at the Wellcome Trust Sanger Institute investigates the biology of Plasmodium, mosquitoes and humans. By understanding the biology of these organisms the programme aims to find new ways to prevent and treat malaria such as new vaccines and drugs.

This film is part of a series of Life in the lab films that provide an in-depth look at some of the laboratory processes used by different team”s at the Wellcome Trust Sanger Institute. The film has been developed to support the OCR Cambridge Technical Level 3 in laboratory skills.