Research

Key words: Malaria Liver-stage Biology, Parasite Knockout,      Life cycle study of KO parasite, Antigen discovery, Drug discovery, Transcriptome, Protein-Protein interaction, Host-Parasite interaction, Genomics.

In the mammalian host invasion of the hepatocytes is the first step towards developing malaria disease. Invasion of hepatocyte by infective sporozoites is complex process and not understood very well. How parasite interacts with its host is the focus of my current research.

We have the following two major areas of interest:

[A]    Understanding Host-parasite interactions during malaria liver stages development. We study in detail the  Plasmodium proteins that modulate the hepatocyte cellular functions. We knockout those parasite genes and analyse global changes in the infected host cell using Omics approaches.

[B]    Antigen/ Drug discovery. We focus on                                                                 

        1. Knowledge based target identification for inhibitor design.

        2. Known and novel compounds assay (ex vivo and in vivo) to test inhibitor/ drug efficacy. 

        3. Discovery of new antigens from liver-stage parasite and evaluation in animal models.

        A multi-disciplinary approach is used to address above issues.

Techniques like gene knock out, gene tagging, protein expression and functional studies, protein-protein interaction,  transcriptome analysis, Immunization and challenge  with sporozoites, fluorescence microscopy, Electron microscopy, histochemistry etc. are routinely being used for this purpose.

    We also work on inhibitor screening in collaboration with many scientist who provide the inhibitors.